When the army of the DNI [commonly called Ukraine’s ‘rebels’] are retired Russian military, the West immediately writes about “Russian aggression”. And if retired (believe that retired) military mercenaries from the EU are fighting on the side of the APU [commonly called the Ukrainian government], why do the same media not write about “the aggression of the European Union?”
Above all else, what has been proved by the bitter experience made by Greek workers with Syriza is that it is impossible to defend anything—jobs, wages, essential social services—without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic and political life. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the major corporations and banks and their government.
The Labour leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn will be remembered for several notable reasons, not least the descent of the UK’s corporate media into unremitting farce, with the Guardian in its role as vanguard of the ‘liberal left’ decisively leading the pack.
As one reads through the hundreds of articles mentioning the four Labour candidates, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that serious, much less harsh, criticism of the New Labour triumverate is not on the agenda. It just becomes obvious that there are no forces within the Guardian willing to support such a focus.
These stories are reflections of the daily realities faced by the children of Gaza. But despite the mountains of information that shed light on these realities, the Israeli public continues to be completely impervious to the consequences of the war waged in its name. This indifference does not result in passivity; on the contrary, it is an active and integral component to the structural violence that dominates Gaza’s population.
Imagine the BBC inviting readers to place themselves in the shoes of an Islamic State cannibal. The simple act of interviewing Abu Sakkar humanised him in a way that is unthinkable for Islamic State fighters, or any other official enemy perpetrating a comparable act.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker threatened to expel Greece from Europe, despite no law permitting this to occur. Let us see now whether he still tries to carry out his bluff, which has been echoed by right-wing leaders throughout Europe. His retaliatory actions from an ostensibly non-political, non-elected office are not alone. The eurozone class war in support of finance against labor and industry is now open and in earnest.
The feverish levels of hysteria emanating from the corporate media fear campaign confirm that the banks, the hedge funds and the rich desperately need Greece to submit to continuing humiliation for their own selfish, greedy ends.
And so we find that major news organisations continue to act as mindless conduits for anonymous state propaganda, somehow unable to learn the blindingly obvious lessons of past deceptions. Given the scale of the Iraq and Libyan catastrophes, this is powerful testimony indeed to the sheer depth of the structural corruption of the corporate media system
After that they managed to break open the fence, and they all came flooding across – it was incredible. Almost every woman had children with her. So many children – can you imagine? You are five years old and you’re left with a memory like this.
Greece’s former representative to the IMF, Panagiotis Roumeliotis, in front of the special parliamentary committee on the Greek debt, said that several Greek journalists were “trained” in Washington D.C. in order to support the positions of the IMF and the European Commission in Greek media.
