Each week, the progressive watchdog
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting presents FAIR TV, a look at a handful of distortions and other skewings in the traditional media. Here is the latest:
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—War is a force that gives us meaning:
Chris Hedges new book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, is not a memoir, but a remembrance of his years as a war correspondent. There are no great confessions or revelations, but an honest exploration of what war brings to us.
In the wake of 9/11, his book is especially powerful, since he shows how the state becomes the religion of the people in wartime, how nationalism subverts honesty and common sense.
Our inability to respond to Al Qaeda in a meaningful way comes from this impulse to bolster the state in time of war, to embrace the myths of heroic violence. A myth slowly and surely coming undone in Iraq. Heroism, embraced on the thinest of pretexts, is now being revealed as sham and artifice.
War is an odd and cruel beast. It changes everything around you even if you don't notice it. We now chase our tails trying to trap Saddam, hunt him down and contain him, while his myth only grows stronger. The Saudis are not going to track down Al Qaeda any more than you're going to build a cathedral in Medina. It's no contest. The odds are high, if you asked, the most popular Saudi in Saudi Arabia is Osama, not the king or his sons. Too much would be revealed by an honest accounting of AQ and the Saudi government.
Hedges talks of how everything is perverted in war, but the one thing he didn't mention was the encouragement of illusions.[…]
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Born on this date (O.S.) in 1814 was Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, the Russian anarchist who competed with Karl Marx in theory and practice, including for leadership in the International Workingmen's Association.
Tweet of the Day:
Nightmare Game of Thrones scenario for tonight: Nancy Grace announces Tyrion's trial, talking the whole time about how he obviously did it.
— @pourmecoffee
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