The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.
What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: “Aren’t you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?”
.. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.
.. the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early
.. this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.
.. only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.
.. In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez.
.. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith.
.. Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed.
.. The economic crisis is pure propaganda.
.. In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks.
.. WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists.
.. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively – and brilliantly – rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.
Is Donald Trump an American Hugo Chávez?
The video, with Spanish subtitles, comes from the Democratic National Committee and is aimed at a particular group of Latino voters: those who fled Mr. Chávez’s Venezuela and other authoritarian countries, like Cuba. It has a particular resonance in Florida, a battleground state and home to an increasing numbers of Venezuelans, especially in Doral, west of Miami, where Senator Marco Rubio has an office.
.. The debate has spread to Mexico, where politicians are comparing Mr. Trump to the leftist presidential hopeful Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Mr. Trump has suggested he might do, Mr. López Obrador rejected the results of Mexico’s last two presidential elections, claiming he was robbed by fraud, and leading protests.
.. “It is not an ideology,” he writes, “but a political logic.” It pitches the idea of a noble section of the people against the idea of an utterly corrupt elite. The populist political strategy centers on this conflict in an emotive way, adapting to fit different contexts — anti-immigrant in the United States, anti-American in Venezuela.
.. While they have wildly different backgrounds and advocate different policies, they are united in posing as the enemy of the entrenched, corrupt elite, who make possible whatever ails the people, be it Muslim refugees or global capital.
.. As the establishment is held as corrupt, today’s populists blame it and its institutions — government, the media — for anything that goes wrong, even when it’s the populists themselves who are to blame. When newspapers report accusations of sexual assault by Mr. Trump, he blames a media conspiracy. When Venezuelans march to complain they have no food, the government denounces a plot by oligarchs and the media. Mr. Trump assailed a judge overseeing a lawsuit against him as being biased. Mr. Chávez jailed a judge who made a ruling he disagreed with.