With a variety of news sites, real and artificial, at his disposal, this writer always takes a few minutes out of his day to glance at CNN. He rushes to assure the reader that this is not to obtain news; CNN is in the entertainment and propaganda business. It is not a genuine news reporting outlet.
But, knowing that CNN is a popular program that many people mistake for news, this writer wants to know what these multitudinous lemmings are being fed, and what they are told to think, and to care about.
Last week, he was once again astounded by ‘news’ as presented by CNN. The article was one expressing shock and dismay about a recent ‘tweet’ by the incompetent egomaniac currently ensconced in the White House. United States President Donald Trump taunted the North Korean government, basically saying ‘my nuclear arsenal is bigger than yours’, sounding more like a schoolyard bully than a world leader.
CNN’s analysts, needless to say, were outraged, as any thinking person should be. But there were other comments slyly inserted that are the focus of this writer’s concern. We will look at them in some detail.
- “The tweet was remarkable not just for its content but for the fact it was generated by a President, the holder of the office that for decades has been the effective guarantor of a US-enforced 70-year era of global peace.”
On what planet, one must ask, has this 70-year era of global peace existed? Certain not earth, since that alleged guarantor of peace has been at war for at least 223 years of its 242 year existence. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the U.S. has been the effective guarantor of a 70-year era of global warfare?
Do these CNN so-called analysts spend all their time in some ivory tower, unaware that the U.S., in the last 70 years, has bombed at least 33 countries? How on earth do they define ‘peace’?
- The tweet “…illustrates how he (Trump) has turned the United States from being a bulwark of stability and sobriety in the international system into an agent of disruption and unpredictability in his own volatile image.”
According to the learned analysts at CNN, the U.S. has been a ‘bulwark of stability and sobriety.’ Careening off from one disastrous military misadventure to another; destabilizing democratically-elected governments either because they lean too far to the left, of they challenge Apartheid Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East, appears, to CNN analysts, as stable and sober behavior. Ignoring the millions of people who march to prevent ill-advised wars, such as was done prior to the invasion of Iraq, represents, according to CNN analysts, ‘stability and sobriety’. Acting as a dishonest broker between Israel and Palestine, all the while favoring Israeli interests and disdaining international law and the human rights aspirations of the occupied Palestinians, somehow qualifies the U.S. to be referred to as a ‘bulwark of stability and sobriety’.
These two quotations were the most astounding in the article, but there were others worthy of note. We will review just one.
- “Trump’s fraught day is also likely to raise new questions about his temperament and capacity to fulfill the profound responsibilities of his position….” You think? Are there really any new questions that can be raised about his temperament? Chief of Staff John Kelly stated that he had never been spoken to, in thirty-five years of government employment (he called it service, but he’s a career military man, so ‘service’ is a misnomer), as Trump speaks to him. Trump remains obsessed about crowd sizes, and still talks about the margin of his election victory, claiming still that he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes due to voter fraud, evidence of which exists nowhere.
As far as his ‘capacity to fulfill the profound responsibilities of his position’, he proved more than once during the campaign, and countless times since then, that few people with less ability have ever been nominated by a major party. He appeals to the basest instincts of the most ignorant members of the population, and was only elected because the Democrats fixed the nomination process for one of the most polarizing candidates in recent history.
So, dear reader, these are the lessons to be learned by that august site, CNN: The world has been at peace since World War II; please don’t talk to veterans, war widows, orphans or parents who lost loved ones during the less-than-peaceful periods of the Korean War, Vietnam War, or during conflicts in Haiti, Grenada, Yemen, Syria, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan, Libya, or any of the dozens of other times the U.S. has attacked another nation. And despite all that, and violence in the streets, political assassinations, torture of political prisoners and support for the most brutal and repressive of regimes (see: Israel; Saudi Arabia), the U.S. is a ‘bulwark of stability and sobriety.’
CNN and Trump are not fans of each other, but CNN certainly serves as an effective cheerleader for the violent, oppressive and corrupt U.S. government. But ‘news’ reporting (read: government propaganda) transcends any one president. The powers behind the throne, the people who grow ever richer due to arms sales, who wish to order the world to their twisted way of thinking, firmly maintaining their positions of the 1% as separate, distinct and far removed from the 99%, care little about who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at any given time. The names change, but the policies, with cosmetic differences, remain the same.
That Trump may be more dangerous than his predecessors is an open question; the CNN article sited herein mentions that other presidents have considered using nuclear weapons, which only shows their lack of knowledge and morality. Such weapons should not exist, let alone be even considered for use. The global disaster of even a ‘limited’ nuclear war (if such a thing is even possible), should motivate every world leader to destroy their nuclear arsenal.
But no, that is not to be the case, when madmen such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu all have such weapons. If one of them decides to push the button, civilization as we know it will end, with the very real possibility that all life on earth will be extinguished. Propaganda pieces from CNN do not help to avoid this potential disaster.