Favorite Targets the BBC Loves To Bash (Under the Cover of "Journalism")

After several years of monitoring the British government's global propaganda arm, the BBC (British Broadcasting Government), what leaps out at me are the following objects of hate at the BBC:

-The Venezuelan government, headed by Nicolas Maduro

-The Colombian rebel movement FARC

-The defunct secret police agency the STASI of the defunct nation East Germany (they just bashed this one again September 14)

-The defunct Soviet Union

-Russia

-Vladimir Putin

Now by "bashing" I mean gratuitous stories that are slanted and grossly unbalanced.

For example, in attacking the Venezuelan govenment, they never give the government's viewpoint, nor that of the millions of Venezuelans who support it. You ONLY hear those Venezuelans attacking the regime, and the foreign governments trying to overthrow it (namely the U.S.). Even worse, while constantly portraying the Maduro government as violently repressive, they have completely hidden the facts that the so-called "protesters" are in fact violent thugs who set fires, attack motor vehicles, burn cliinics, murder policemen, and have burned alive dark-skinned poor people who the "protesters" presume are Chavistas, based on their pigmentation and economic class. But that's not bad enough for the smarmy and dishonest propagandists at the BBC. They cynically add in the people, including police, murdered by the thugs the BBC portrays as brave oppressed people fighting for democracy, with the street goons who get themselves killed while committing felonies in the streets, in one total, which they mislead listeners and viewers into believing are all victims of government violence.  They talk about "protesters," then give a number of people killed to date, sneakily aggregating deaths on both sides without telling you.

NPR, a U.S.-government domestic propaganda network, is the same as the BBC in regards to how it "covers" Venezuela.

You don't have to be a supporter of the Maduro regime- I'm not- to see that this vulgar propaganda is merely a political operation to prepare public opinion in the U.S., UK, and wherever in the world people are stuck relying on the BBC for their "news," for the overthrow of the "evil" and "repressive" Venezuelan government, in the name of "restoring democracy."

Yeah, the U.S. and UK are so in love with democracy that both are shoveling armaments in the Saudi Arabian regime''s hungry maw as fast as they can. Saudi Arabia, one of the two most repressive countries on earth (North Korea is the other) is using those weapons to destroy Yemen. They are butchering its people, starving them with a naval blockade, and causing an uncontrolled cholera epidemic which has sickened over 600,000 Yemenis and killed several thousand already. All to try to put in power a so-called "president" who has so little indigenous support that like the South Vietnamese generals who ruled that ersatz country, are totally reliant on foreign military power to try and subjugate the populace. (One group, the Houthis, were able to put the fake Yemeni government to flight in Saudi Arabia.)

Western guff about "human rights" and "democracy," SOO cynically dishonest, has done much to discredit those essential concepts. Just as the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and going down the scale of degeneration, the likes of Pol Pot in Cambodia (or "Kampuchia" as it was styled when his psychopaths, the Khmer Rouge, ruled it) and Robert Mugabe in Ziimbabwe and others, have discredited and destroyed the very words "communism" and "socialism" with their cynical misappropriation of those terms for their own base power manias, so are human rights and democracy being delegitimized by the scumbag imperialists of "the West."

The BBC (and the entirety of Western power-establishment media) has been so grossly twisted on the question of Ukraine, and Crimea, that it merits a separate essay. Just coincidentally, an example of deranged BBC distortion of reality occurs as I write this. According to the BBC, Russia is now holding military exercises "close to NATO's frontier." In other phrasing, they "report" breathlessly "Russian military operations near NATO's border- is it cause for alarm." That is to say, inside Russia on Russia's own border. It just so happens that NATO has pushed itself RIGHT UP TO THE RUSSIAN BORDER. So now if Russia stations its OWN MILITARY INSIDE ITS OWN BORDERS, that is deemed to be a "Threat" to NATO! Amazing.

I don't like Russia, and Putin is a sinister autocrat. But I don't throw objectivity and reason out the window because of it.

But then, I'm not a propagandist.

Bourgeous Elitists of Nobel Committee Snub FARC, Award Prize to Colombian President ONLY

In an unprecedented move, the  Norwegian swells who decide who is worthy of High Acclaim and Prestige in the world, awarded the annual Nobel Peace Prize they control to only one side in a "peace process." The worthies gave the prize (funded by deceased explosives multi-millionaire Alfred Nobel) to Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, omitting his negotiating partner, the rebel FARC organization and its leaders. [1]

Consider previous similar prizes: in 1994 the Peace Prize was bestowed upon the Israeli political bosses Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, and the Palestinian "terrorist" Yasser Arafat, for initiating the deceptively misnamed "Oslo Peace Process." (It actually was a con job and long stalling process during which, over eight years, the Israelis, with their U.S. patrons running interference for them, doubled the "settler" population in the occupied territories while pretending to be "negotiating" for a future Palestinian state on the same land. This was yet another of Bill Clinton's deceptions and crimes against humanity.)

In 1993, the Big Prize went to the president of the racist apartheid South African regime, F. W. de Klerk, and the "terrorist" ANC head Nelson Mandela, for negotiating a transition to more democratic rule, ending a decades-long period of repression and insurgency.

And in 1978, the prize went to Egyptian president Anwar Satat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin (formerly head of the terrorist Irgun). This for negotiating a peace treaty between their two nations.
But apparently the FARC is beyond the pale to the international bourgeoisie.

Facts, history, and reality all have to be ignored in the "universal" demonization of FARC by the international bourgeoisie. Start with the estimated 250,000 who have "died in the 52 year conflict." Most were unarmed civilians murdered by the military, police, and fascist auxiliaries, the right-wing death squads euphemised as "paramilitaries" (never "terrorists," the label officially branded on FARC). Just a year ago or so mass graves were discovered outside a military base containing the corpses of civilians murdered by soldiers who claimed their victims were "guerrillas," to obtain  bounties and inflate their body count.

It is also misleading to refer to a "52 year long civil war." There was a previous cessation of war- but not of violence, as it turned out- when the FARC laid down their arms and ran candidates for office. This turned out to be a great opportunity for the rich of Colombia to try and exterminate people for progress. The Colombian bourgeoisie duly unleashed their fascist killers on the FARC candidates, supporters, and allies, to murder thousands of "leftists." This period of one-sided violence lasted from 1984-87. And according to Wikipedia: "In 1989 a single large landholder had over 400 UP members murdered. Over 70% of all Colombian presidential candidates in 1990—and 100% of those from center-left parties—were assassinated." [Sources at Wikipedia.] [2]

The fact of the previous three-year attempt by FARC and others to "participate in the political process," which was met by massive state terrorism, is virtually blacked out of bourgeois history and media commentary. This is ideologically and politically necessary in order to paint FARC as "the bad guys," ruthless killer terrorists who "take hostages" (capture prisoners to try and exchange for their own people held as prisoners by the government, which has always refused prisoner exchanges) and "traffic in drugs" (as if the Colombian goverment, the "paramilitaries," and the CIA DON'T do the same).

By the way, the U.S. has sent its experts in state terrorism down to Colombia at least since 1959, five years before the FARC took up arms. This "Special Survey Team" of "counterinsurgency experts" recommended a sinister program of "intervention," and that "to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature." In 1962 another group of U.S. Army covert terrorists, headed by a general this time, paid another visit to Colombia to conspire in repression with the Colombian "security forces"  by teaching them methods, equipping them, and over all institutionalizing "professional" methods of ubiquitous human rights atrocities and a permanent feature of this typical U.S. client state in its "own backyard."

The award to Santos comes days after a referendum presented to the Colombian public to ratify the peace agreement negotiated with FARC was rejected by a bare majority of 50.2% of the 40% of eligible voters who actually voted. Thus 20% of the electorate defeated the deal.

In the aftermath of the vote, the BBC among others has given play to the complaints of the fascist elements of the Colombian elite who opposed the agreement. They are outraged that FARC members won't be imprisoned as long as they confess. (No mention of the crimes and impunity afforded to their death squads and their military.) They are also outraged that FARC didn't have to turn over all their weapons before an agreement!!! And they find it unacceptable that a whole ten seats were to be reserved in the bicameral legislature for the FARC. (I guess they think the FARC's candidates should just be murdered, as happened during the last peace agreement.)

The previous president, Alvaro Uribe, a rich landowner who founded the death squads, has been a vociferous opponent of any peace agreement with FARC.  He led this opposition, preferring to press on with extermination. (Aided by U.S.-guided assassination of top FARC personnel.)

Enjoy your prize, Santos. I mean the 8 million Swedish Krona ( a bit less than one million U.S. dollars, $926,000 as of today.)

Maybe the Norwegians just didn't want the U.S. to indict them for providing "material support to terrorism"!

1] Alfred Nobel was a Swedish industrialist, trained in chemistry and engineering who is usually described as an inventor and "innovator," His big "innovation" was developing dynamite. During that process, there were glitches along the way, including an explosion that killed his brother and four others. By 1867 his efforts bore fruit. After dynamite, apparently obsessed with explosives, Nobel invented gelignite in 1875, which is even more  powerful than dynamite, and in 1887 he patented ballistite, a predecessor of cordite.

Another of his "innovations" was converting the iron and steel manufacturing company Bofors into a major weapons maker, especially of heavy armaments like cannons. 

Nobel grew rich from dynamite and from his trade in arms and ordnance. But he was stung in 1888 by an obituary about him which a French newspaper, mistaking Nobel's brother for Alfred himself (the brother had just died), published, which stated: "The merchant of death is dead" and "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." 

Nobel, desirous of having a good reputation "in perpetuity" as they say, that is, worried about what people would think of him after he was dead and no longer existed, hit upon what has proven to be one of the most brilliant, effective, and durable public relations moves of all time. He set up the Nobel Prizes, to be funded after his death through a trust fund in which he secretly put most of his wealth (the amount in the trust estimated at $265 million in current U.S. dollars), causing disappointment and surprise among his relatives and friends, who only discovered this after his death. (Rich people are almost invariably selfish creeps, and love to stick it to the fawners and sycophants who cravenly try to curry their favor in hopes of a big payoff in the future. The rich often secretly hold these wishful thinkers in contempt. Their wealth makes them chronically paranoid and distrustful that other people are only interested in them for their money. This is one reason the rich generally limit their friendships and socializing to other rich people, forming an insular and armored class of the rich.)

There are five Nobel Prizes, for Chemistry (natch, since he was a chemist), Peace (ironically), Literature, Physics, and Physiology or Medicine. They were first awarded in 1901. The "Economics Prize" was invented later by the Bank of Sweden, which attached it to Nobel's name to leech off the prestige of the real Nobels. The bank got the  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the two science Nobels, to hand out the "Economics" prizes. Swedish institutions handle the awards other than the "Peace" prize, which is controlled by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. For some reason Nobel didn't want his fellow Swedes handling that one. Go figure.

2]  Wikipedia, FARC entry, October 7, 2016.

The Last Time the FARC Disarmed, Thousands of its Members Were Slaughtered. Is That About To Happen Again?

Sometimes history doesn't repeat as farce, but as yet another tragedy. Of course, one person's tragedy can be another's cause for celebration. (The Nazis and the Jews- and hopefully now most of the rest of humanity- had very different feelings about the Holocaust, for example.)

You wouldn't know it from establishment media "reporting," but the just-announced ceasefire between the Colombian rulers ("government") and the rebel force FARC, under which FARC will disarm and become a political party and presumably participate in elections, is the second time we've been here.

The same agreement was made back in 1984, the so-called La Uribe Agreement, FARC disarmed and came out into the open. The following year, FARC got together with various leftist and communist groups to create a  new political party, the Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP). The UP sought terribly evil political reforms, such as a revised constitution, democratic local elections, political decentralization, and most unforgivably, an end to the hegemony over Colombian politics by the Liberal and Conservative parties. They called for desperately needed health and education spending, favored nationalization of foreign businesses, Colombian banks, and transportation, and public access to the oligarchy's media. They even had the effrontery to pursue land redistribution! (Hundreds of thousands of rural families were rendered landless by people like Alvaro Uribe, father of the fascist death squads and the previous president of Colombia before the current one.)

Needless to say, all this was unacceptable, so the rulers unleashed their death squads, which dutifully murdered not just one, but two UP presidential candidates, numerous UP public office-holders and officials, and as many as 6,000 people all told between 1986 and 1990. In 1989 a single landholder had over 400 UP members murdered. (Notice that rich Colombians all have an individual license to kill.) And in 1990, every single presidential candidate from all the center-left parties were assassinated. Apparently merely stealing an election is too humdrum for the Colombian "elite." (Most of the UP ranks were not from FARC, but from socialist and labor groups.)

Will this time be any different? Given the bloodthirsty history of the Colombian ruling class and its military and auxiliary fascist death squads (euphemistically referred to in Western media as "right-wing paramilitaries," when they're mentioned at all), there is reason for grave concern. This new Colombian ceasefire may well  be a prelude to yet another ruling class extermination campaign against its class enemies.

You would think this very germane antecedent would bear at least a mention, but no. This part of history conflicts with the propaganda narrative of Western media, so it is simply ignored completely, as if it never happened. [1]

Instead, we are now being fed false and grossly misleading propaganda like this from the U.S. Government's NPR, and the British Government's BBC (every half hour around the clock from the BBC): "historic ceasefire," as if it's a first; the ceasefire is "to put an end to five decades of war..." (if you don't count the years 1984-1990- although I guess in a sense most of those years was a war, if a one-sided one, like the "war on drugs," or the Nazi "war against the Jews) "...and turn them [FARC] into a legal political movement;" FARC will become a party and "will try to gain political power in Colombia through democratic means," as if they never tried that before. As if the problem is violent leftists who don't believe in democracy, not a ruling class that doesn't allow the vast majority of people to participate except to rubber-stamp two ruling class parties!

And the same aforementioned propaganda outfits keep telling us that 220,000 or 260,000 people were "killed in the conflict." That neatly sidesteps the fact that the vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians slaughtered by the government's military and the rulers' death squads. It also avoids mentioning the mass grave found outside at least one army base, of local civilians murdered for bounties. The government had the brilliant idea of paying bonuses for dead "guerrillas." So grab a poor peasant and murder him- easy money!

The BBC put on an American polemicist and unreconstructed imperialist named Steven Pinker, a hustler originally from Canada who now bills himself as a "cognitive scientist" and wrangled a perch for himself in the psychology department of Harvard University, a school that is sort of a Ground Zero for U.S. imperialist ideology. Pinker instructed that the Colombian civil war (bourgeois media never call it a civil war) "is the last remnant of the Cold War," which can only mean that FARC was a cat's paw of the Soviet Union, part of the "International Communist Conspiracy," the alibi U.S. imperialists long used to justify their coups, invasions, and imposition of fascistic military dictatorships and various repressive regimes designed to quash democracy and social progress in its sphere of influence- a sphere which they believe ultimately should rightly include the entire planet, the dream of every imperialist who ever lived.

Ask yourself this: in the quarter century since the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, has U.S. behavior changed one bit? To the contrary, NATO, which was created, it was claimed, to defend against a Soviet invasion of western Europe, has since been expanded right up to Russia's borders, and assigned new missions helping fight the U.S.'s wars in far-flung lands. The U.S. is still aiding and abetting coups against democratically-elected governments, as in Honduras, Egypt, Venezuela, and Brazil. It is committed to a relentless expansion of its power. Through the NSA, it attempts to spy on all communications everywhere. It has put in train a trillion dollar buildup of nuclear weapons.

And what about the period before the Soviet Union came into existence in 1917? Over a century earlier, the U.S. invaded British Canada to try and annex those lands for itself. In 1846 it attacked Mexico, ultimately forcing Mexico to cede over half (55%) of its entire national territory to the U.S. (including Texas), with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In 1998 it started a war with the decrepit Spanish empire to seize Spain's colonies, even the Philippines, on theother side of the globe. (The Filipinos had the crazy notion that they were entitled to self-determination and independence, so the U.S. had to beat that notion out of them with the usual methods of torture and mass killing.) The U.S. invaded various Caribbean and Central American nations numerous times in the first decades of the twentieth century. And so on.

Cold War my eye.

Steven Pinker. Even a clown can spout imperialist propaganda.

Let's briefly review how FARC came into existence in the first place. It's not some inexplicable derangement of innately evil people.

In 1948, the ruling classes inaugurated a decade of mass murder with the assassination of popular politician  Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. Over the next ten years, a period called La Violencia, (The Violence,), over 300,000 people were murdered, overwhelmingly peasants and poor laborers. Then in 1958, the bourgeois elites of the "Liberal" and "Conservative" Parties, in cahoots with the ever-reactionary Catholic Church and big businessmen, set up a two-party dictatorship they christened the National Front. The two parties would take turns ruling, irrespective of actual election results. "Radical" were frozen out of political life. This oligarchic arrangement, a political monopoly of the upper classes enforced by state repression and violence, lasted until 1990.

In 1959, the U.S. sent a crew of its state terrorists ("counterinsurgency experts") down to Colombia to assess the situation and craft a state terror campaign to crush any reaction to the slaughter of the preceding decade.. The U.S. Army "Special Forces" (aka Green Berets) recommended that  "in order to shield the interests of both Colombian and US authorities against 'interventionist' charges any special aid given for internal security was to be sterile and covert in nature," which beneath the jargon is quite sinister. Then in 1962 another "Special Warfare" [i.e. state terrorism] team from Fort Bragg  paid a return visit, led by the Special Warfare Center commander himself, one General William P. Yarborough. He recommended to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (notice the high level this conspiracy is operating on) the formation of a "paramilitary" force to carry out sabotage and terrorism against "communists." This plan was duly implemented. The criminal conspiracy was dubbed Plan Lazo.

Under this plot, the U.S. goaded the Colombian government to attack villages that tried to arm themselves for self-defense. In one such operation, 16,000 Colombian troops, backed by U.S. might, attacked the village of Marquetalia, a community of 1,000 souls, 48 of whom were armed. These armed men managed to escape, and led by Manuel Marulanda Vélez, one of their number, founded FARC, which grew from that beginning.

If Colombia had ever been a democracy, if the rulers of Colombia weren't murderous thugs, if they didn't systematically assassinate popular leaders and slaughter hundreds of thousands of people, would the FARC even exist in the first place? No.

The propaganda systems of "Western" nations like to paint FARC as evil and the source of all violence in Colombia. This is a grotesque distortion of the actual history of Colombia, which makes clear that FARC was formed in response to the hyper-violence of the "upper" classes in Colombia against the "lower" classes. Members of the victim classes in fact were forced to take up arms.

Western propagandists also enjoy portraying FARC as a gang of degenerate kidnappers and drug lords. What's rarely mentioned is that they aren't the only ones using drugs as a source of funds. The corrupt Colombian government has plenty of officials involved in protecting the drug trade. The "paramilitaries" partake of cocaine money. And the CIA has profited from drug trafficking almost from its inception. So the high moral dudgeon of Western media rings a tad hollow to an objective person's ear.

The FARC was basically forced into accepting the current dangerous deal, even though it may well be walking into the same deadly trap as it was lured into in 1984, again, thanks to the U.S. Because of massive U.S. military and "intelligence" aid to the Colombian regime, FARC has been crippled and diminished. Under two Democratic Party presidents, Bill "Golden Tongue" Clinton and Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, sinister U.S. operatives from the CIA and military, and large amounts of weapons, were sent in to fight on the side of the regime against the rebellious sectors of its populace. Under Obama, FARC leaders were located and then assassinated. FARC was strategically trapped in a downward spiral of the U.S.' design. So now tell me again, all you "progressive" fellow-travelers, why we should vote for the Democrats!

So under Obama, U.S. "policy" in Latin America has consisted of: a coup attempt in Venezuela, then the probable murder of Hugo Chavez by the CIA; a coup in Honduras; imprisoning women and children fleeing U.S.-created violent hellholes in Central America; approval of a coup by corrupt legislators in Brazil; and a vicious "counterinsurgency" campaign in Colombia that has killed thousands. Oh, but he reestablished relations with Cuba, the better to subvert the established order there. (Cuba does need changes, by the way. Say, that "naval base" in Guantanamo Bay, you ever gonna get the hell out of there, U.S.?)

None dare call them imperialists!

The very respectable Alvaro Uribe, Godfather of Death Squads, President of Colombia 2002-2010

1]  I've only ever come across one mention of the 1985-90 extermination campaign in the establishment's media that I can remember. It was buried about two-thirds of the way down in a lengthy New York Times article, consisting of a short paragraph or two, very matter-of-fact, and then the article returned to FARC-demonization, as all NY Times articles dealing with FARC do. So is it not correct to call the NY Times imperialist propaganda? That's not a polemical statement, it's a factual one.

"History of FARC," Wikipedia, August 29, 2016.