Flashback: Why Mainstream Media Refuses to Report the West's Shocking New Colonialism

Information Clearing House
Anthony Wile

May 16, 2011 "The Daily Bell" --  To ask the question is to answer it. The Western mainstream media seems entirely controlled and beholden to globalist interests emanating in part from the City of London. Reports and exposes of neo-colonialism are not likely to find a place on the front pages of the great dailies and weeklies of the old-line press – nor even on websites controlled by it.

There is another answer, too, that I will provide at the end of this article. It is simple and blunt. Thus you may skip the article if you want. Or you may read on ...

Democracy is said to be on the rise in the Middle East, yet all democracy is evidently not created equal. Democratic movements in Egypt and Tunisia are said to have won out. Yet similar movements in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia – inconvenient by Western standards – are neither encouraged nor widely reported.

This makes sense only when one realizes the truth about what is going on. The world's great, intergenerational banking families have embarked on a new spate of colonialism to disenfranchise their enemies and empower their allies. Those regimes in developing countries that endorse power-elite goals will be allowed to function. Otherwise they will be destabilized.

Hardly a whisper regarding what is evidently and obviously a deliberate policy of "neo-colonialism" has been heard from the West's mainstream media. Thus it was with interest that I read an article in yesterday's online version of The Hindu, India's "national newspaper" entitled The Manufacture of Consensus and Legitimacy. Author M.S. Prabhakara deals with many of the issues raised in these electronic pages in the past few weeks.

Prabhakara has pretty much figured it out – as we have over the past few months. He believes the recent conflicts in the Middle East and Africa raise important questions about the limits of national sovereignty, as United Nations resolutions were used to justify invasions into both Libya and the Ivory Coast. Here's some more from the article:

Foreign armed intervention to save the people from their own governments and leaders became inevitable. The question who decides that there is indeed a mass uprising that is being repressed with such violence by the very state that is supposed to protect its people becomes irrelevant in an environment where the media and 'civil society' exert enormous influence in moulding national and international opinion, and something else called R2P. And thereby hangs a tale.

This new and evolving doctrine that has legitimised foreign intervention to remove leaders like Qadhafi on the ground that they have become 'enemies of the people' was crafted through an 'international consensus' during the 2005 UN World Summit and has come to be known as the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (R2P, in the jargon of the new language order). This consensus was manufactured by NGOs networking with the United Nations and other national and international human rights organisations.

The Preamble [to the R2P doctrine] drips with moral commitment to protect the 'people' against their own governments, even if these were to be elected governments. It also raises many questions. For instance, the mechanisms built in democratic polities to remove elected governments that have become oppressive are not even taken into consideration because the state and its elected representatives have become corrupt beyond redemption, unlike the 'civil society' that is axiomatically seen as immaculate, unstained.

The key point raised in the article is that "above all, this very 'international community' now entrusted with the 'responsibility to assist the states in fulfilling this responsibility,' to protect their population from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, has itself waged war against their own people, committed genocides."

And, yes, this is the critical issue. Prabhakara catches the heart of it: "Put simply, instrumentalities such as the R2P [we've reported on this previously, along with the under-the-radar abrogation of the Peace of Westphalia] devised by the 'international community,' like the ongoing demeaning of the democratic political process in India by positing against it 'non-political politics,' are yet another weapon being crafted to assist the relentless process of recolonisation under way in many formerly colonised countries."



What Prabhakara doesn't cover – perhaps there is a limit to what can be discussed in one article – is the larger distortion of elite rhetoric when it comes to the new neocolonialism. In Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen, the West, Western elites more and more are justifying torture, illicit imprisonment and outright murder. The decline of civil society is not just rhetorical. Saudi Arabian troops have murdered and maimed hundreds of civilians at home and in Bahrain with the West's implicit blessing.

The myth of al-Qaeda, at least initially an American invention, has been enlarged and elaborated on until the nonsensical War on Terror itself has taken on mythical proportions. Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, only a few months ago a dependable Western ally, is suddenly a marked man; NATO bombs his residences with impunity, kills one of his sons and three of his grandchildren and hardly bothers to apologize.

Neocolonialism's New Brutality is evident everywhere. American troops invade Pakistan to attack the residence of a faux bin Laden, and kill, wound or capture whoever unfortunately resides there and then the country's leaders trumpet the raid as a great American achievement. The mind-bending spectacle of Western leaders celebrating the cold-blooded murder ("tapping") of a man who probably died years ago was only exceeded by the next wave of deliberate rhetoric that claimed that "unusual interrogations" – torture – helped reveal his location.

It is all evil and deliberate – a media promotion featuring a complex interweaving of violent dominant and sub-dominant social themes. The world's single super-power has, as Dick Cheney reportedly suggested it should, moved toward the Dark Side, and is taking much of the world with it. Celebrations of killing, justifications of torture, the imposition of the hallmarks of a police state at home and the support of neo-colonialism abroad all inform us that America is changing for the worse.

Yes, it is chilling. When America lies, its allies lie, too. When American leaders tell deliberate untruths and treat human lives as if they are entertainment in so-called snuff-films, those who live in the shadow of the world's super-mono-power are left to mumble in unison or face the consequences. It goes for the media too, of course. These days, instead of celebrating businessmen, America's mainstream media mostly lionizes the military class – its brilliant generals and intrepid warriors.

Instead of profiles of entrepreneurs, the media is filled with stories about America's overseas combatants and courageous soldiers. Such soldiers are courageous but they are also killing others and maiming themselves for what might be considered very questionable objectives.

Two terrible wars and incessant, unnecessary spending have virtually bankrupted the US. Yet war continues, poisoning the land with depleted uranium and killing women and children who get caught in the crossfire or bombed by misguided drone attacks.

Those who oppose them in America seem helpless to stop the violence that is being projected in their name. America's leaders are pressing Iraq to allow American troops to stay in the country in great numbers. In Afghanistan, troop drawdowns have been pushed back from 2012 to 2014 and now beyond.

But the main issue – the most astonishing and unheralded even of the unfolding 21st century – is the West's sudden expansion of neo-colonialism and the accompaniment savage, reprehensible rhetoric by its leaders, especially in America, Britain and France. Afghanistan and Iraq were just an appetizer after all.

To me it seems obvious. Just as with the Gutenberg Press long ago, the elites have lost control of the ability to control society via fear-based promotions because of what we have taken to calling the Internet Reformation. The elites, therefore, are evidently and obviously doing what they can to combat this reformation – this awakening – by causing economic turmoil and military confrontations.

Both tactics have as their goal increased world domination; but these are the bluntest of tools. To watch them being applied by Western leaders is to be astounded by the ability of those who lead the most civilized of societies to endorse the most uncivil and brutal acts.

Here is the answer I promised at the beginning of the article: We seem to be led, unfortunately, by beasts. Is that harsh?

Anthony Wile is an author, columnist, media commentator and entrepreneur focused on developing projects that promote the general advancement of free-market thinking concepts. He is the chief editor of the popular free-market oriented news site, TheDailyBell.com. Mr. Wile is the Executive Director of The Foundation for the Advancement of Free-Market Thinking – a non-profit Liechtenstein-based foundation. His most popular book, High Alert, is now in its third edition and available in several languages. Other notable books written by Mr. Wile include The Liberation of Flockhead (2002) and The Value of Gold (2002).

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