[lbo-talk] (US Media) War declared on resistance

[Brad Mayer]

Put this in the file with CBS' withdrawal of the show that dared to poke
a little fun at our Glorious Gipper, whose precious legacy shall always
remaim immaculate in our hearts.  In reality, the Reagan-Thatcher
counterrevolution began America's slide into the mass psychosis it is
now utterly in the grips of.  You might recall that the prime
ideological predicate of The Legacy was absolute denial of Americas'
historic decline.  Hence it must remain unquestioned still, here in
cloud-koo-koo land.  It's also the period when the American/Israeli
Likud got their first real taste of power:

War declared on resistance 

November 7, 2003 

Los Angeles: The Los Angeles Times has ordered its journalists to stop
describing anti-American forces in Iraq as resistance fighters, saying
the term romanticises them and evokes World War II-era heroism.

[Interjection:  Why not stop calling them "anti-American forces"?  Or
why not also call them "anti-Polish forces"? Yeah, I know, they're just
shooting at them becasue they're Americans.  I can imagine some Iraqi
now, thinking, "Damn! I hate Polacks!  Think I'll go kill me one.."]

An email circulated this week asked staff to instead use the terms
insurgents or guerillas. 

[Why stop at phony half-measures? Why not just call them "The Evil
Ones"?  "The Evil Ones shot down another US helicopter today.."  Oops,
but it is also verboten to directly admit that "they" shoot down
anything of "yours", see:  Six U.S. GIs Die in Iraq Helicopter Crash 
http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=world&cat=iraq  Why not
"mysterious helicopter crash"?  "100,000 die in mysterious Hiroshima
atomic blast", and so forth? But back then, they still said: "Yeah, we
vaporized them".  Not any more. Sure glad I'm not an American
journalist.]

An assistant managing editor, Melissa McCoy, said on Wednesday that the
memo followed a discussion among top editors at the paper and was not
sparked by reader complaints.

McCoy said she considered the term resistance fighters an accurate
description of Iraqis battling US troops, but said it also evoked World
War II - specifically the French Resistance or Jews who fought against
Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. 

She was confident that Times reporters who used the term had no
intention to romanticise the Iraqis who have killed more than 100 US
soldiers since Washington declared the war all but over in May. The
paper's Baghdad bureau had no objection to the change.

[Don't worry, the scribes are all safe.  They're not romantics; they've
all got flag decals on their cars] 

David Hoffman, foreign editor of The Washington Post, said his paper had
used the phrase resistance fighters to describe Iraqi forces and had no
objection to it. "They are resisting an American occupation so it's not
inaccurate."

Reuters

This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/06/1068013331454.html