Newsweek spins war-mongering a tad lighter

The Newsweek "Extra Edition" on September 11th
events featuring a cover of the World Trade Center
explosion included all the gory photos and
war-mongering, calls for repression and fluffy
coverage of government politicians that the other
capitalist media presented. It's not surprising,
because Newsweek is a mouthpiece of a faction of
imperialism that tends to support the Democratic
Party.

In this issue, Newsweek reminded the united $tates
of the conditions that Bush gained the presidency
in. It also pointed out that Bush is the least
experienced president in foreign policy in recent
history. Newsweek even quoted one prospective
Democratic Party candidate for president as saying
that a lightweight president is now a luxury the
country cannot afford. Clearly Newsweek is for the
Democratic Party faithful.

What interests MIM in this issue is that Newsweek
wrote a handful of paragraphs of scientific
interest. We agree with Newsweek about the state of
politics in Amerikkka just before the World Trade
Center came down: "We are paying the price of our
complacency--the price of a decadelong flight from
seriousness in the way we view public affairs.
Since the end of the cold war, this country has
been bound together by little more than collective
consumerism and a mutual thirst for distraction.
Media were tabloid media. Reality was reality TV.
This summer, for instance, the United States
conducted 16 days of bombing against targets in
Iraq. Almost no one noticed, perhaps because the
story involved no sharks. Even those stories more
extensively covered than we might remember--like
violence in the Middle East, the No. 2 story of
the summer--didn't resonate. The strife was
worrisome but tiresome, and it did not seem much
connected to our everyday lives."(p. 52) MIM would
only add that a country like that cannot suddenly
pretend it knows what to do about international
violence. It needs to study and not take up the
simple genocidal solution pursued thus far-- the
idea that simply killing some people and millions
of by-standers will solve the problem.

Newsweek did offer a few good sentences on this
point: "If we're not careful, we will condemn
ourselves and our children to endless, episodic
war. They hit us. We hit them. They wait awhile,
then hit us again. That cycle would destroy the
America we know."(p. 53) In this, Newsweek nicely
expresses the peculiarly Amerikkkan idea that
there is no war unless it kills Amerikkkans.
Thanks to September 11th, now it is possible the
world could be caught in "endless, episodic war,"
says Newsweek, fully justifying that the
international proletariat cease its generosity to
U.$. imperialism.

Despite a couple good paragraphs in the whole
magazine, Newsweek does take up the standard
Doublespeak of the large u.$. media and claims it
is standing for "freedom" against Osama bin Laden.
"These policies are not merely about making money
or playing with new technologies. The West has
created a world in which individuals are free to
choose how they would like to live their
lives--how they work, travel, trade, worship,
organize, speak and think. These freedoms are
utterly revolutionary in the history of the
world."(p. 49)

Newsweek goes on with utter falseness: "Around the
world people have been happy with the fruits of
globalization in the 1990s: the peace and
prosperity it produces, the ease of trade and
travel, the goods and services, the information
and entertainment it generates. They watch the
movies, listen to the music, read the magazines,
vacation in America and try to send their children
to college here. But none of this requires them to
actively support the United States or affirm its
values. They can denounce America by day and
consume its bounties by night.

"But all these countries--in Europe and Asia and
Latin America-- must recognize that the world they
have gotten used to will not survive if America
collapses. The United States is the pivot that
makes today's globalization go round. If other
countries believe in individual liberty, in free
enterprise and free trade, in religious freedom,
in democracy, then they are eating the fruits of
the American order. And this order can be truly
secure only when all those who benefit from it
stand in its defense. Freedom-loving people
everywhere cannot watch this struggle as if it
were a horror movie, wondering how it will end.
This is your struggle, too."(p. 49)

News media like Newsweek that typically hire
several people to write and check stories over
before publishing them should do a better job on
the facts. The United $tates is no "free country."
It leads the world in imprisonment per capita.
Even if the united $tates did everything that the
Libertarian Party proposed by releasing drug
offenders and legalizing pot, the United $tates
would still be #2 in lack of freedom as measured
by per capita imprisonment.

People in the united $tates are routinely thrown
off public and private property for demonstrating
or handing out literature and the government
blocks and censors MIM Notes for thousands of
prisoners who want to read it. As for the "freedom
to travel," there is now military court for
foreigners accused of crimes in addition to
indefinite detention. Amerikkka invites foreigners
to the united $tates and then it indefinitely
detains them. Even before September 11th, far from
having "freedom to travel," the United $tates
closed its borders to the majority of the world's
people and even locked up many visitors here for
years on end simply for allegedly not having visa
papers. Courts have decided that Bill of Rights
protection does not apply to foreigners, only U.S.
citizens. As Newsweek should have known, the
border at Mexico is more closed now than it has
been since World War II and there is an increasing
crackdown at the Canadian border as well. The
deaths at the Mexican border have exceeded those
of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War that
Newsweek alluded to.

It's all well and good to beat one's breasts for
"freedom." To proclaim that it already exists in
the united $tates is quite another matter. Those
bragging about freedom here in the united $tates
are precisely the ones covering up the lack of
freedom and thereby opposing freedom. 

Freedom will not exist until the conditions for humyn
cooperation exist. It's all too clear in every
poll conducted since the bombings how a
substantial minority of the U.$. public wants to
round up Arabs in camps, while a substantial
majority wants to detain people indefinitely,
allow the government to monitor all Internet
activity, create a national id, etc. etc. The
communists are working on the conditions necessary
for freedom, but they will not exist for a long
time. The difference between us communists and
Newsweek is that we take the goal of freedom
seriously enough to work on a long-term project to
achieve it, but Newsweek is really a nationalist
publication, bragging about non-existent
achievements. The most common form of Amerikkkan
nationalism exemplified by Newsweek is boasting
about freedom that does not exist.