by cameron | Jun 7, 2009 | geopolitics, Iran, Iraq, US politics
I watched Obama’s Cairo speech live via YouTube (how amazing is that?). My initial impressions were very positive. I, like everyone else, was in awe at his smooth delivery and words of peace. He’s certainly a breath of fresh air as an American President after Bush (even if I do like to refer to him as ‘the infallible chocolate Jesus’, a term I borrowed from Bill Maher who, in turn, borrowed it from Tom Waits. Oh and anyone who thinks that makes me racist, grow a brain. One uptight American blocked me on Twitter for referring to Obama as chocolate Jesus. If I called him the ‘Black Messiah’, would that be racist?).
Anyway, I was impressed with Obama’s speech… until… I watched it again the next day and I started to think about it from the perspective of the citizens of the Middle East and what THEY want to hear Obama say.
Anyone who has read anything about the history of USA – Middle East relations, knows that the reason people in the Middle East are angry about the USA has nothing to do with religious differences or even George Bush specifically. They are angry because for 60 years the USA has been interfering in their countries, overthrowing their governments and taking their natural resources and wealth at the point of a gun. The USA have supported Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the oppression of the Palestinian people. The USA have supported oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, and various African countries (eg Uganda) in return for access to the natural wealth of those countries while the citizens have remained in poverty.
None of this is news to people living in the Middle East. This is their history. This is their reality.
So if Obama genuinely wanted to "change" relations between the United States and the people living in the Middle East, he would have talked less about religious differences and said something more like:
"For the last 60 years, America has terrorized your countries, murdered your citizens and stolen your natural wealth. I am here to promise you that will never happen again and you no longer need to fear us."
Until the USA admits their past crimes and pays compensation to the victims, everything else is just blowing smoke.
It seems to me that Obama’s speech was targeted, not at the citizens of the Middle East, but at Americans who, after feeling ashamed (understandably) by Bush’s warmongering rhetoric, are just relieved not to be portrayed on the international stage as a bunch of neocons. Is this enough, though? I mean, I understand it, but if Americans want to be taken seriously on the international stage again, surely they need to be seen to be talking about the REAL ISSUES, not cosmetics?
Of course, most Americans haven’t read Chomsky or Pilger or Zinn or Monbiot or anything else written by critics of American policy (and I’m not talking about Democrat vs Republican which is just theatre distracting people from the real issues) so they don’t even understand what the real issues are. Most of them still don’t understand that the 9/11 attacks were RETRIBUTION and not terrorism. They were REVENGE for atrocities committed by Americans for decades against the people of the Middle East.
And, of course, most Americans have spent their entire lives being conditioned 24×7 by the American media, being told that they are the good guys, that even when they do wrong it’s an honest mistake made for the right reasons, that Americans are the saviours of the worlds (no wonder they think they’ve elected the messiah).
So few Americans can even begin to comprehend that their Presidential elections are a farce and that Obama is just another in a long line of candidates specially designed by PR professionals to appeal to a certain demographic. As I heard Bill Maher say on a recent show: "You don’t get to be President when you are 46 and black unless you have powerful friends in very high places who believe you will look after their interests. And so far all he’s done is look after the interests of his buddies he went to Harvard with, the American elite."
Obama is a Hollywood President. He looks good, sounds good, has a good backstory, he’s obviously smart, smooth, and can sell the sizzle. And after the Bush years, most Americans can’t get past the joy of the sizzle and ask "where’s the sausage?" They can’t even stand to hear criticism of Obama. Even Bill Maher gets booed on his show when he criticizes Obama.
Anywayyyy…. regarding the Cairo speech, apparently Noam Chomsky has the same concerns.
by cameron | May 26, 2009 | GDay World Live
We’ll be talking about the stories of the week – Christians letting their kids die, George Bush’s holy war, the difference between terrorists and heroes, the USA’s stance on torture, and, of course, CHK CHK BOOM, punking the media. The special guest for that last segment will be Bronwen Clune, who will be joining us around 10pm AEST.
I’ll be using Tokbox again tonight, so keep an eye on my Twitter feed for the conference link, about 8pm AEST.
by cameron | May 24, 2009 | Australian media, technology
Buy your commemorative t-shirts here!
Clare Werbeloff has punk’d the news. Brilliant. For years the news media have been punking us. It took Clare Werbeloff to turn the tables. She punk’d them. She made up the entire “chk chk boom” story on the spur of the moment. What talent! What creativity! What balls!
Years from now, when studying how the media died, I’m sure journalism professors will point to Clare as one of the defining moments. She perfected the media punk model.
1. Be in the right place at the right time.
2. Find a news crew.
3. Make sure you’re looking hawt – the news doesn’t talk to fuglies.
4. Create a somewhat believable story.
5. Here’s the most important part – Come up with an instant catch phrase that works as a 10 second sound bite!
Together we can speed up the end of the old media by punking them over and over, day and night. They won’t know who to believe. And let’s face it – they won’t care. It’s not like they have cared much about what’s true for the last 20 years anyway. What they care about are the three S’s: sensationalism, scandal, and selling advertising. So this is just taking their model to its natural conclusion.
PUNK THE NEWS!
by cameron | May 23, 2009 | geopolitics
Last night I went to the cinema to see "The Baader Meinhof Complex", an excellent film about the rise and fall of The Red Army Faction (RAF), an urban guerilla movement started by disaffected students in West Germany in the 60s who carried out bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and robberies in an attempt to bring awareness to the corruption in the West German government which, they felt, was being run by former Nazis with the support of large American corporations. Were they terrorists, guerillas or freedom fighters? It all depends on who is telling the story.
I totally recommend this film although it’s not for the faint of heart and you won’t come out of the cinema feeling uplifted or positive about the state of the world. The issues that the RAF were protesting in the 60s are still around – and in a worse state – today. American imperialism runs rampant across the globe, using the ‘free media’ as its propaganda tool and manipulating the minds of the populace with suggestion that an Obama is really more than a couple of degrees different from a Bush.
The film stars a couple of familiar faces –
Horst Herold, who played Hitler in the brilliant DOWNFALL (which has served for unlimited parodies on YouTube) and here plays the president of the Federal Police, and warns the politicians that the guerillas won’t stop until their issues are actually addressed, something none of the politicians wants to hear.
Moritz Bleibtreu who I remember as the lead role in DAS EXPERIMENT, another brilliant film, and here plays Andreas Baader, the flawed but fearless leader of the RAF. As his girlfriend says at one point "Andreas has more revolution in him than the rest of us put together."
Anyway, go see the movie.
With the question of "terrorist or freedom fighter" fresh in my mind, I was reading from Robert Fisk’s excellent book "The Great War For Civilisation – The Conquest of the Middle East" today and the following lines jumped out at me. He’s writing about Afghanistan in the late 70s:
For "terrorists", read "guerillas" or – as President Ronald Reagan would call them in the years to come – "freedom fighters." Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists. In the Middle East, in the entire Muslim world, this word would become a plague, a meaningless punctuation mark in all our lives, a full stop erected to finish all discussion of injustice, constructed as a wall by Russian, Americans, Israelis, British, Pakistanis, Saudis, Turks, to shut us up. Who would ever say a word in favour of terrorists? What cause could justify terror? So our enemies are always "terrorists." In the seventeenth century, governments used "heretic" in much the same way, to end all dialogue, to prescribe obedience. Karmal’s policy (CR Note: Karmal was the President of Afghanistan who was in support of the Russian invasion) was simple: you are either with us or against us. For decades, I have listened to this dangerous equation, uttered by capitalist and communist, presidents and prime ministers, generals and intelligence officers and, of course, newspaper editors.
Click on the book cover to order the book from BookDepository in the UK – free worldwide shipping!
As Fisk points out – every time you read or hear the word "terrorist", be aware that it’s being used to shut you up. It’s a manipulative word, a weasel word, and the use of it by politicians or the media should tell you something about their true agenda.
by cameron | May 8, 2009 | Uncategorized
I’ve written an overview of the Livewire story over on the TPNx blog (which is where I’m talking about social media things). I think it shows one way that social media can break a story and, more importantly perhaps, keep the story alive.
