Doug had two really good interviews last Saturday that bare on this thread. Here is a link for Behind the News, Mar 26:
http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/68524
Ashcar explains his support of the intervention in Libya. Joel Beinin is even better on events and history in Egypt and sketches out the labor organization which was essential to later events.
Beinin is also involved in battles against US-Israel foreign policy and domestic political harassment of US academics i.e. one face of the American Thought Police. Here is a link to a long essay on attacks on middle eastern studies departments:
http://www.stanford.edu/~beinin/New_McCarthyism.html
I think this background helps explain why there is so little solid information produced in US mainstream media on the Middle East. As a result, it is very difficult to inform ourselves, especially in the middle of a dis-information war.
Of course this intended confusion and blindness is not restricted to the Middle East. Similar information wars cover most important events: the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, the nuclear disaster unfolding in Japan, the crashed economies, the criminal financial industry, the escalating attacks on labor, and on and on.
This system makes it difficult for journalists to find candid experts in various fields and report what they have to say---even if they wanted to. It seems much easier to just call up the appropriately correct think tank and get their view.
Martin Jay wrote a book called The Virtues of Mendacity that came out last year. It occurred to me that the problem with lying in politics is that it prevents the society from protecting itself and taking corrective action. This is a short video of Jay describing his book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGuOlIdlr4M
The mass deception campaigns waged under Bush prevented most of the country from seeing the impending disasters of wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
It was apparent that the mass cover-up of the BP disaster made it nearly impossible for people around the Guft to take any action to protect themselves against a gross pollution threat.
A year later we are watching the same type of cover-up of the extent of the nuclear disaster in Japan, and the same result. People have to make blind decisions to leave or stay and of course the poor take the greatest hit.
Carrol Cox wrote,
``... no one who calls him/herself a leftist should see the necessity or usefulness of painful study of the alleged facts behind the latest criminal war waged by the US and/or the EU..''
Consider empirical facts as a mode of perception. For example, if you don't know, because you are blind, that you are walking toward a giant hole in the sidewalk, you probably will not change direction and will therefore take a bad fall. The fact that there is a giant hole in front of you, is an important fact to know.
The blinding of public knowledge of concrete threats to public interest means the society can not protect itself. This general principle seems to me to apply to all threatening disasters that have on going developments in one form or another.
CG