The Skinny: Spin Doctrine
Spin Doctrine
On An Example of How “False Balance” in the Media is Helping Obscure Trump’s Fascist Agenda:
Trump administration to expand DNA collection at border and give data to FBI
One of the more frustrating aspects about analyzing the fascist creep in “Trump’s America” and how it’s covered by a largely complicit, but still fully politicized corporate media is learning to walk the line of truth and accountability; to avoid having to choose between absolving a fascist society for the obvious fascist consequences of its open embrace of fascist ideology and absolving a clearly fascist leader and his clearly fascist administration for making things demonstrably worse because “well it’s always been like this.”
I mention this because in today’s article analysis we’re looking at a brief October 3rd, 2019 update in the Guardian about the Trump administration’s (still theoretical) proposal to “expand the collection of DNA from migrants who cross US borders, and to include the information in a vast criminal database operated by the FBI.”
Now the first thing most people are going to notice about this description is the word “expand” which implies that the U.S. government is currently collecting DNA records on migrants. If you read the whole article however you’ll discover that this is at best marginally true; the government currently does rapid DNA testing to detect adults “falsely posing as parents” of migrant children at the border between the United States and Mexico. Although on the surface this discrepancy might seem fairly minor (after all, it is covered in the article) the ultimate effect here is both extremely dangerous for society at large and openly advantageous to architects of the fascist creep slowly strangling the entire “West” as we speak.
In The Guardian’s defense, they are one of the few major outlets that reports on the bipartisan nature of America’s nightmare fascist immigration policies but the idea that cataloguing the bio-metric data on millions of migrants and turning it over to the FBI for criminal enforcement purposes has any real relation to a genetic paternity test used to identify potential child trafficking victims at the border crosses the line from “fair minded” and into an objectively “false balance.”
In light of the fact that almost all of the undocumented migrants who pass through the southern border are Mexican, Central American and South American, what the Trump administration is proposing here is nothing short of a high-tech version of an ethno-nationalist or Nazi watch list; a necessary precursor to apartheid, mass deportations or open ethnic cleansing. While The Guardian does not make the effort to connect these dots, they do point out that this proposed plan fits in neatly with the Trump administration’s attempt to associate migrants with criminal behavior and that such a genetic record would provide identifying information about the families of migrants, regardless of their individual citizenship status. The fact that turning the list over to the FBI happens to help generate the narrative that brown migrants are dangerous criminals is really just icing on the cake however; this DNA list makes the dystopian, police-state possibilities of Bush Administration’s objectively racist and Islamophobic “no fly list” look like joke by comparison.
This policy is not an expansion; it’s new (DHS secretary Janet Napolitano refused to do it in 2010), terrifying and when combined with the fact that we *already* have concentration camps housing people whose only crime is crossing an imaginary line to escape U.S. sponsored violence, poverty and environmental destruction, this proposal is a rather obvious sign of America’s descent into open fascism – a topic the Guardian doesn’t even remotely address in this article.
Look, I’ll be the first person to tell you that the Democratic Party of the past half-century has been just as brutal, repressive and xenophobic towards brown migrants along the southern American border, as their sh*thead Republican counterparts. We didn’t get here overnight. Trump didn’t make undocumented migrants a class of people it was okay to violently persecute and lock up for profit. Downmarket Mussolini’s administration didn’t even build the concentrations camps that Trump’s fascist lapdog Stephen Miller is using to create space for the “white ethno-state” of his dreams. Healthy societies don’t elect fascists and America has spent a very long time embracing the principles a man like Trump embodies with every monstrous action he undertakes.
But in our quest to recognize that it is important that we still understand that Trump is crashing our society through barriers and taboos that exist for a reason – he might not have battered the gates down, but he’s happily steering the nation towards something that looks eerily more like Nazi Germany every single day.
If you forget that simple truth, you end up writing articles that accidentally leave out the important part of the story and strongly suggest that one of the most terrifying potential policy decisions in the history of U.S. immigration enforcement is merely an “expansion” of policies we already have.
Articles like this one.
On What “Staying to Help the Kurds” in Northern Syria Really Means – from Mastodon:
In terms of Syria, Turkey and the Syrian Democratic Forces militia, I find the position of a lot of the American “left” to be either misinformed or openly paradoxical.
Look, you can be mad at Downmarket Mussolini for all but inviting Erdogan to attack northern Syria but the truth is that it isn’t his decision to make and that’s all window dressing; Assad remains the president of Syria and the SDF, a firmly anti-Assad militia that supports Kurdish independence, is occupying Syrian territory.
In other words, what the media calls “staying to protect the Kurds” or “staying to fight another ISIS” is actually “continuing to violate Syrian territorial sovereignty against the wishes of the Syrian government whose leader has explicitly called US troops (not Turkey) invaders.” Trump may be a selfish nazi prick, but he’s absolutely correct that with the defeat of the Caliphate, the US military’s supposed rational for continuing to help occupy northern Syria no longer exists – it’s just another forever war in occupied territory now.
This brings me to my larger point and the obvious issue that much of the Kurd-sympathetic “left” seem to be missing: simply put, you cannot be against “imperialist forever wars to do regime change” and simultaneously for “staying in Syria to protect the Kurds” – at this exact moment the SDF in northern Sryia is objectively an insurectionary rebel army illegally occupying portions of the Syrian state. Just because they call it Kurdistan doesn’t make it so. This is why Assad hates them, and us.
This is how all the dumbest imperialist crap America ever does, always starts. I’m talking Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya; you can go right on down the list. People see something horrible happening or about to happen on TV combined with an emotional appeal cloaked in crocodile tears from a corporate media that always hungers for war, and automatically you all cry out “do something” without ever asking “what that something would have to be, and what it would have to mean to do it?” What exactly would “staying in northern Syria to help the Kurds” actually mean? For how long would we stay? And what would we be “helping the Kurds” to do?
We’d have to stay as long as the SDF was threatened by Turkey or Syria; which means forever. Since the SDF is currently illegally occupying Syrian territory and facing down the Turkish army “helping them” would consist of defending them from not only Syrian troops but an actual NATO f*cking army. Again, this is a rebel militia in Syria.
In other words, “staying to help the Kurds” means prolonging the war in Syria indefinitely – another forever war – which would suit most of the people on your television who’re telling you sob stories about the brave Kurdish resistance, just fine.
Folks, these guys who are currently howling about Trump’s removal of US troops from what will soon be an active war zone, don’t care about the Kurds – they care about the ongoing Pig Empire mission, which is deposing Assad and then ultimately “Iraqing” Syria.
This is not about freedom, or democracy, or sticking up for the little guy, or the CIA’s longstanding relationship with the Kurds. The Pig Empire absolutely does not care about any of those things; they are just the cloak in which the emotional appeal for war in Syria is being delivered to the masses – the U.S. has never fought a war for human rights, not one, ever. It’s just easier to start a war in Syria back up again at a moment’s notice if you’re *already* there. That’s all this is about.
Haven’t you noticed a distinct overlap between “people who are mad we’re betraying the Kurds” and “people who were mad Obama didn’t start a proxy war with Russia, in Syria, to overthrow Assad?” This is not a coincidence, they are related issues; to demand that Trump stay and “help the Kurds” means to prolong the war in Syria and to carve out what is effectively a new state out of an unwilling foreign power – that’s a war ladies and gentlemen, plain and simple. This is Vietnam all over again.
In your desperate rush to “save the Kurds” from a NATO power, you’re literally demanding Downmarket Mussolini effectively guarantee Kurdish independence in Syria – if we’re so sure that Turkey is going to do massacres, why the hell are they our allies and in NATO?
Do the Kurds have other options? Yes, yes they do – they’ve already indicated a willingness to work with Assad, the leader of Syria who is the rightful owner of the land Turkey is invading. We can’t do anything here but fail and destroy.
Are you prepared to go to war with Turkey, thus obliterating NATO? Are you prepared to down Russian fighters to depose Assad? If the answer to either of those questions is “no” then you need to start rethinking your position on “staying to help the Kurds” very f*cking quickly. There are how many other countries in NATO? Do you see any of *them* volunteering to stand in front of Turkey’s tanks or finish the war to depose Assad in Syria? Why do you think that is?
These are hard choices now. We can’t just pretend that putting American troops in the middle of what will quickly turn into a guerilla war is going to make Erdogan or the Kurdish fighters play nice; see “the entire history of peacekeeping before now.” Why weren’t these media folks calling for intervention when Erdogan was purging Kurds from his government just for being Kurdish? Because it would mean war.
So the real question is simple: war in Syria? Yes or no? I choose no. Don’t you? Haven’t you already? The question shouldn’t be “why aren’t we staying to fight Turkey to protect the Kurds” because that question basically amounts to “why don’t we blow up NATO and start the big one?”
Like it or lump it, Turkey is a US ally and a member of NATO. There is nothing for us to do here unless we want to start what might actually become a world war – to protect an unrecognized Kurdish militia on sovereign Syrian soil. How the hell can you sell that one to history? Doesn’t *that* advantage our “enemies?”
The media does not give a flying f*ck about “the Kurds” and in reality this entire sob story is about trying to flip the board BACK to “let’s invade Syria” – the Kurds have options but Kurdistan does not. The western empire’s conflict industry doesn’t ever give up my friends; they’re already saving plans for when a guy like Biden wins and Trump’s fear of another Iraq is in the rear view mirror. Even within the swine emperor’s own government, there are factions inside the war machine who’re drooling for another war.
I don’t wish the Kurdish people, or the SDF in particular any ill will, but what these folks are asking you to do is support another forever war to do regime change in Syria, because some CIA ghouls and warmongers in previous administrations promised to help them carve up Syria in a war the American people have never agreed to, and never supported as a whole. That’s not my fault and I’m not sending my kids to die because James Clapper said you had a deal.
Besides, I don’t say this to be cruel but I’m a history student and in that discipline we deal in realities that are often quite different from political promises and speeches. Factually, the U. S. is never going to support the creation of Kurdistan. We may lie about supporting it, but we’re absolutely not going to let a militant left wing movement run Bartertown after we murder Assad and take over – just like we didn’t grant autonomy to the Kurds in Iraq either. So this “alliance” is doomed.
Finally, as you’re watching the American corporate media suddenly develop some heretofore nonexistent concern for the plight of brown people victimized by U.S. foreign policy decisions in the MENA region, please keep in mind that that every place the Pig Empire military has gone since WWII to stop “tyranny” has ended up worse by the time we left. Every. Single. One.
Even if you believed these ghouls cared about the Kurds, staying in Syria isn’t going to fix the problem.
Those are just the facts.
On the Pig Empire Origins of Terrorism and Militant Sunni Radicals:
Look, we’ve been funding Sunni militant radicals since ten seconds after the Shah fell in Iran to Shiite political Islam; it’s the same weapons, the same funding networks, the same madrassas, the same leaders, just new desperate young men to do the dying.
For longstanding historical and cultural reasons I’m not going to go into here; these militant “Sunni” radicals don’t like Russia and they don’t like Iran – which means we, the Pig Empire, like them just fine. Who exactly is “we?”
Well that’s more complicated; we is definitely the CIA and it’s often the U.S. and Israeli governments. We is always Pakistani intelligence, we is always Saudi intelligence and although we is *sometimes* not the Saudi government itself because the radicals attack them too, they don’t actually care enough to stop the open recruitment and training of more radicals. We is often wealthy Gulf state Sheiks too, but they don’t do this kind of shit on their own; not even infinite money buys surplus military hardware and CIA-arranged supply shipments. In other words, the “we” who supports militant Sunni radicals our newspaper often calls “terrorists” is a lot of powerful people in “the West” and it’s MENA holdings, who feel they can use terrorists for their own goals; personal, political or religious – the effect is all the same.
Thus is can be said that despite some differences in ideology and constantly evolving leadership, the Mujahideen is Al-Qaeda which is ISIS which is Moderate Syrian Rebels; it’s all the product of the same covert and financial networks and let me assure you that these networks simply could NOT exist without state sponsors – such as the United States, Israel, the KSA, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, Qatar and sometimes, France or Germany.
The obvious question then becomes, especially in light of the horrific terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 – “why would we keep funding these guys if we know they will eventually attack us?”
The answer is going to be hard to accept for many people but the simple truth is that Pig Empire (and all of these various actors within it) gets more from destroying countries like Libya, Iraq, Syria, etc, than they lose in the context of ongoing and sometimes quite lethal terrorist attacks. They just don’t care – in fact fatal terrorist attacks can demonstrably used to squeeze more money and power out of most western populaces; it’s a cost-benefit analysis and in the long run, the math adds up to supporting terrorist networks as long as they hate someone the Pig Empire doesn’t like – or at least it adds up for *some* people.
So in response to public demand for security or outrage after an attack, you change the leaders around, you stop funding one guy and start funding another – but the funding networks, the training camps, the state intelligence agencies that sponsor the radical militant Sunni forces, always remain to help project Pig Empire power into hostile neighboring countries. From that lens the real problem with the horrifying attacks on 9-11 wasn’t the innocent dead people, it was that the whole thing got captured on live television for the entire world to see.
Remember, at the end of the day the CIA’s real enemy is governments that won’t let us install colonialism for the benefit of corporations. We’d rather work with dangerous right wing fundamentalists who do murders than even a moderately left wing Soc Dem country in “our MENA.”
This is what people never really understood about Iraq – Halliburton, the creation of an “occupation” industry and lucrative government contract corruption weren’t *side effects* of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They were the point. Yeah, oil was pretty high on the list of commodities the Pig Empire wanted to loot from Iraq, but they weren’t going to stop there; from the first football of the invasion, through the “rebuilding process” and all the way up to redesigning Iraq’s economy based on Milton Friedman’s libertarian wet dreams, the point was to crack the country open like a piggy-bank and squeeze every dollar we could from our “colonial asset” – both in the short and long terms.
We don’t fight wars for the reasons they tell you.
And as much as I’d like to blame the staggering corruption of the Bush administration – the damn truth is we have never, not once, fought a war for human rights. It’s always been like this; as such there will always be armies of militant Sunni radicals on the payroll of Western and Western-allied intelligence agencies and there will always be a danger that those mercenary armies turn against Western targets and commit acts of terrorism against the Pig Empire and its citizens.
Although it probably wasn’t Einstein who said it, it’s fair to point out one observer’s keen realization that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” By those guidelines, it is clearly not only the “terrorists” who are “insane.”
- nina illingworth
