The Media’s Double Standards.

Rubbisn-In, Rubbish-Out: If professional journalism, undertaken with courage and diligence, produces only what the powerful want us to hear, then our journalists are truly lost. In spite of their education and training, they have so profoundly internalised the values and expectations of their masters that their journalism can only reflect the interests of the people who pay them.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has been in Hanoi, talking peace with Kim Jong Un. The “Supreme leader” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) who sat across the table from the American President, has never faced any kind of election that would be recognised as fair and free – let alone democratic – by the United Nations. Indeed, the totalitarian Workers Party regime presides over a vast network of concentration camps teeming with political prisoners.

Economically speaking, the DPRK is fragile. In recent decades, its people have suffered a succession of devastating famines during which thousands of men, women and children are reported to have died of hunger and hunger-related diseases.

In marked contrast to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the DPRK possesses multiple nuclear warheads, and claims to have tested missiles capable of raining down devastation on the United States of America.

None of these facts dissuaded President Trump from praising Kin Jong Un or, indeed, referring to him as his friend.

This should not be construed as a condemnation of the US leader. In the memorable words of Winston Churchill: “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” If the meeting in Hanoi between Trump and Kim has eased military tensions on the Korean peninsula, even to a small degree, then the world should be mightily relieved and both men will fully deserve the international praise heaped upon them.

Serious questions do arise from the Hanoi Summit, however, concerning diplomatic and journalistic consistency. The United States and the Western news media both need to explain why the measured diplomacy and largely accurate reporting on display in Hanoi, has been so conspicuously absent with regard to Venezuela. The naked diplomatic aggression and outright lies which have characterised the West’s treatment of the Venezuelan Government could hardly be more different from its handling of the DPRK’s “Supreme Leader”.

The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro and his fellow Chavistas have, since coming to power in 1998, submitted themselves to – and won – a plethora of democratic elections and constitutional referenda. Many of these have been confirmed as fair and free by no less an observer than the former US President, Jimmy Carter.

Venezuela, unlike the DPRK, is not studded with concentration camps teeming with political prisoners. On the contrary, the streets of Venezuela are teeming with Maduro’s political opponents. Many of these, supported by the United States, have engaged in acts of extreme violence against the Venezuelan Police and National Guard. Rather than respond with deadly force, however, the forces of law and order have consistently restricted themselves to non-lethal means of dispersing Venezuela's far-right protesters.

Where comparisons with the DPRK can be drawn is in relation to economic management. Maduro’s period in office has been marred by runaway inflation and severe shortages. These have given rise to widespread economic hardship and political frustration. Unlike the DPRK, however, Venezuela’s economic difficulties are driven by a combination of low oil prices and the deliberate economic sabotage instigated by Venezuela’s capitalist elites and their US backers. They are not the result of diverting all available resources to the production of a deadly nuclear arsenal. The only diversion of resources of which the Chavistas are guilty is from the state’s oil revenues to the Venezuelan poor.

The explanation for the United States oppressive behaviour towards Venezuela is readily available in any reputable history of the USA’s tutelary relationship with the nations of Latin America. Perceiving itself as the benevolent guardian of all those peoples unlucky enough to live south of the Rio Grande, the United States has intervened again and again. Refusing to sit idly by while its diplomatic wards embraced to the evils of “communism”, due, in the words of the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, to “the irresponsibility of their own people”.

But if the American state is straightforwardly imperialistic in its motivation, what is the Western media’s excuse? Why do the editors and journalists of not only the United States and its Nato allies, but also of supposedly free and independent nations like New Zealand, abandon all pretence of discovering and disseminating the truth to parrot the blatant lies of Venezuela’s enemies?

What would happen if One News or the Herald decided to see for itself what was really happening inside Venezuela and along her borders? What would befall the Kiwi journalist who made a point of speaking to the politicians of both the Left and the Right; to the inhabitants of the wealthy suburbs above Caracas, as well as those buried in its overcrowded slums; to police officers and national guardsmen as well as right-wing student protesters; to workers as well as peasants? Would he or she emerge from the exercise spouting exactly the same lines as the US State Department?

If the answer to that question is “Yes”, then we have a very big problem. If professional journalism, undertaken with courage and diligence, produces only what the powerful want us to hear, then our journalists are truly lost. In spite of their education and training, they have so profoundly internalised the values and expectations of their masters that their journalism can only reflect the interests of the people who pay them.

That’s a very grim conclusion, but what other is possible? When the American President can smile benignly at the “Supreme Leader” of a brutal totalitarian regime with nary a word of condemnation from our mainstream news media; but, in the first item up after the ad-break, the democratically-elected leader of a free, if bitterly divided, nation is routinely denounced as a brutal dictator?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 1 March 2019.

The Symptom … And The Cure?

The Art Of The Deal: “[T]he old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles, but we have overcome them and we are here today.” North Korea's Kim Jong Un responds to President Donald Trump's introductory remarks at their historic summit-meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, 12 June 2018.

THE NOTE OF SURPRISE in the voices of the talking heads on CNN was unmistakable. How could this be happening? How could these two men – both of them routinely ridiculed by those claiming expertise in international relations – have gotten even this far? The leaders of USA and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, meeting in Singapore on Tuesday, 12 June 2018 and exchanging warm handshakes across the table. The eccentrically-coiffed and generously-fleshed scion of the redoubtable Kim dynasty, Kim Jong Un, offering up to the world the amazing soundbite:  “the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles, but we have overcome them and we are here today”. How was any of this possible?

One might as well ask – how was the 1972 meeting between Mao Zedong and President Richard Nixon possible? American GIs and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had been in a shooting war barely 20 years before that historic summit in Beijing. For quarter-of-a-century the US Pacific Fleet had shielded the Nationalist regime on Taiwan from the People’s Republic’s wrath. And yet, it happened.

In Oliver Stone’s movie “Nixon” there is a memorable scene in which Chairman Mao, through his interpreter, asks Nixon: “Is peace all you are interested in? The real war is in us. History is a symptom of our disease.” The dialogue is, of course, the work of the film’s screenwriters: Stephen J. Rivelle, Christopher Wilkinson and Stone himself; but it succinctly captures an essential truth about such extraordinary political figures as Mao Zedong, Kim Jong Un, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

Some political leaders are content to be guided by their advisers – like George “Dubbya” Bush. For others, it is the events in which they are caught up that provide the opportunities for extraordinary displays of leadership. Think Winston Churchill in World War II, or, Lyndon Johnson and the struggle for Black civil rights 1964-65.

Then there are the leaders who, for a whole host of reasons, become the authors of events to which all these other, lesser, statesmen must respond. Grandiloquent and narcissistic, often paranoid, they are prey to deep existential fears and driven by inner-demons of unrelenting ferocity. This kind of leader has the power to project the turmoil and tumult of their own psyches onto the world around them. The ability to, in Stone’s memorable formulation, make History a symptom of their disease.

The rest of humanity has every reason to fear such individuals. Who in their right mind would cast themselves as a plaything in someone else’s paranoid fantasy? Democracies, in particular, should reject such individuals, in whose character there is much more of the emperor and dictator than there is the citizens’ humble representative.

Except, of course, History has a way of infecting individuals with the diseases whose morbid symptoms they will subsequently cause it to display. A nation rent by anxieties and resentments can hardly avoid throwing up the exceptional individual in whom those anxieties and resentments have not only been distilled to an uncommon purity, but who is also able to express them with extraordinary clarity and force.

Democracies in decay are particularly vulnerable to such individuals. The causes of a nation’s inner corruption, when given individual political expression, become accentuated and the process of decomposition is speeded-up. A malign feedback loop emerges by which the neuroses of the nation are both fed by – and feed – the person it has made its own. Be it Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump, the people’s “drummer” renders a double service: he is both the person who beats – and the person who is beaten.

Is it really so unbelievable, then, that the America which has grown so deeply resentful and untrusting of its political elites should be willing-on the President who has so openly defied them? That the more the experts deplore Trump’s ignorance and denounce his unwillingness to be guided, the more his supporters thrill to his insouciance.

“It’s about attitude. It’s about willingness to get things done”, declared the President, who went on to claim that he would know within the first minute of their meeting whether Kim Jong Un was serious about reaching a deal. When asked how, he replied simply: “My touch, my feel – that’s what I do.”

Encountering this phenomenon, it is hardly surprising that Kim, a genuine emperor, could believe that all the old prejudices, practices and obstacles might – just – be overcome.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 15 June 2018.

Taking Care of North Korea.

Yesterday's Diplomacy: The Trump Administration has dispatched a naval strike force to the seas off the Korean Peninsula. Unfortunately, the Kim family's dynastic dictatorship cannot afford to be seen to back down in the face of the President's gunboat diplomacy. Any US attack on North Korea will, likewise, force "Supreme Leader" Kim Jong Un to unleash "Total War" on its enemies. President Trump is, hopefully, being reminded that Kim doesn't necessarily require an ICBM to deliver a nuclear device to US territory - an unsuspecting container ship will do the job just as effectively.

 

PRESIDENT TRUMP says North Korea “will be taken care of” if its dictator, Chairman Kim Jong Un, authorises another round of nuclear weapons tests. A naval strike force, led by the Nimitz-class “supercarrier” the USS Carl Vinson, is positioned off the Korean Peninsula. The American ships will soon be joined for “exercises” by an undisclosed number of Japanese naval vessels.*

 

This grim show of force is intended to serve as a stark reminder of America’s ability to project its military power wherever and whenever if desires. In the aftermath of the recent Tomahawk Cruise Missile strike on Syria, Kim is expected to draw the obvious lessons and stand down his nuclear weapons testing programme.

 

This is not something the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) can do. Not without sustaining a catastrophic loss of face. Though it possesses all the trappings of a Soviet-style socialist state, the DPRK is, in reality, a quasi-monarchical dynastic regime, whose hereditary rulers are required to maintain an image of unassailable power and strength. Backing down in the face of American threats would likely prove fatal to the Kim family dynasty.

 

This would not be on account of the North Korean people rising up and overthrowing their semi-sacred head of state. Such is the iron grip of Kim’s “Workers’ Party” government that the North Koreans would never hear a word about their leader’s back down. The threat to Kim would come from his generals and party bosses. They chafe under the Kim family’s ruthless rule. The international humiliation of Kim Jong Un would be a heaven-sent opportunity to bring his family’s dynasty to an end.

 

A successful American strike against the DPRK’s nuclear weapons test site at Punggye-ri would deliver a similar blow to Kim Jong Un’s prestige. Not that the North Korean people would learn anything at all about a US attack. Punggye-ri is located in rugged, mountainous terrain, far from large population centres. The remoteness of the testing site could not, however, keep the upper-echelons of the army and the party out of the information loop. How would their Supreme Leader respond?

 

Much would depend of just how successful the American strike turned out to be. Punggye-ri is a complex of deep tunnels drilled into solid rock. An attack using the same ordnance as the Syrian strike would likely prove ineffective.

 

The Americans do, of course, possess much larger bombs: like the 10-ton “bunker-buster” dropped on an ISIS-controlled tunnel complex in Afghanistan earlier this week. (Was that operation supposed to send a warning to the North Koreans?) The problem with these huge weapons, however, is that they can only be delivered by large, relatively slow, military aircraft. The Americans would, therefore, have to destroy the fighter aircraft and surface-to-air missile batteries with which the Punggye-ri complex is defended. This would be a major military operation on the part of the United States.

 

There can be little doubt that, confronted with an American assault of such magnitude, Kim Jong Un would order “total war” against the United States. Thousands of 170mm Goksan artillery pieces and 240mm multiple-tube rocket launchers, among the largest such weapons in the world, would rain down death and destruction upon the South Korean capital, Seoul, and devastate the US military bases adjoining the Demilitarised Zone. According to the former US Commander in South Korea, General Thomas A Schwartz, the 28,000-strong US army in Korea “would be destroyed in less than three hours”.

 

Kim Jong Un’s order to unleash total war upon the United States would set in motion something else. A nuclear device, probably not much bigger than the bomb which devastated Hiroshima, would set out towards one of the key ports of the United States. Concealed in the hold of a fishing trawler. Or, perhaps, hidden in one of thousands of identical shipping containers stacked on the deck of a container ship bound for San Diego or New York, this device would be effectively undetectable and unstoppable until it came close enough to inflict scores-of-thousands of civilian casualties. Such a catastrophe would dwarf completely Al Qaeda’s attack of 11 September 2001.

 

And President Trump’s response? (Assuming the North Koreans weren’t inventive enough to deliver their nuclear device to a warehouse in Washington DC!) Who would be willing to bet against the enraged American president ordering a retaliatory nuclear strike against North Korea? Would he listen to those who pleaded with him not to incinerate millions of innocent North Koreans for the crimes of their Supreme Leader? Would he care that the radioactive fallout from such a strike would be no more a respecter of international borders than the fallout from Chernobyl? How could America’s Commander-in-Chief be sure that the Chinese and Russians would not respond in kind?

 

Can Donald Trump really “take care” of this?

 

 

* This information was subsequently revealed to be more “fake news” from the Trump Administration. At the time of writing (16/4/17) the USS Carl Vinson and its strike force was nowhere near the location indicated by the White House Communications Director, Sean Spicer. As of this morning (19/4/17) the strike force was still, apparently, en route!

 

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 18 April 2017.