Absolutely correct, Special.
Posted on 03/17/2022 7:36:50 AM PDT by george76
When you see corporate outlets rushing us into war in Europe with sensational stories and flat-out dishonest polling, think twice.
The night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sat at anchor in Havana, Cuba. A few minutes after 9 p.m., the nightly ritual of “Taps” from Fifer C. H. Newton’s bugle descended over the ship. Some half an hour later, the forward end of the ship rose suddenly above the water.
“Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion,” detailed author Tom Miller. “Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”
The explosion, which killed more than 250 men on board, was quickly memorialized with cries of “Remember the Maine!” Without directly accusing Spain, which controlled Cuba at the time, a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry decided a month later that the explosion was from a mine. (A U.S. Navy investigation decades later found it was likely an accidental coal bunker fire.)
Shortly afterward, the United States declared war on Spain, starting the Spanish-American War. One of the biggest warmongering forces in America, capitalizing on the Maine‘s explosion, was the press — a position American media pundits continue to hold as they work overtime to drag Americans into a war with Russia over Ukraine.
When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the “Ghost of Kyiv” to that Snake Island story to old photos taken years ago, you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it censors conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less). It wouldn’t be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war.
How Newspapermen Helped Start a War in Cuba..
It was the so-called golden age of newspapers, after the influence of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the “penny press” — newspapers you could buy at the street corner without a subscription. Competing magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought for readers, and they did so by trying to produce the most sensational news possible.
As the story goes, in the year before the Maine exploded, Hearst had commissioned reporter Frederic Remington to go to Cuba, where Cuban revolutionaries were skirmishing with their Spanish colonizers. When Remington sent Hearst a wire to explain he was leaving Cuba because there was no war to cover, Hearst reportedly replied, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”
After the sinking of the Maine, headlines like “Spanish Treachery!” and “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy!” and “Invasion!” and “Who Destroyed the Maine? $50,000 Reward” splashed across front pages. The United States went to war in April, two months after the Maine perished.
The media’s eagerness to gin up a war mirrored the push for involvement from other voices in politics and culture. Some Americans had sympathy for Spanish-owned Cuba as fellow colonial revolutionaries, while others wanted to see U.S. influence and territory expand internationally.
Half a century prior, when the phrase “manifest destiny” was being coined, the United States had gone to war with Mexico over Texas but also ended the war with acquisitions of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. By 1898, the United States had purchased Alaska from Russia and claimed several Pacific islands.
Many Americans saw a similar opportunity for territorial expansion in a fight with Spain over Cuba. Sure enough, the United States exited the Spanish-American War with new acquisitions from Guam to the Philippines to Puerto Rico.
While the warmongers weren’t limited to the press, they were certainly concentrated there. The State Department Office of the Historian writes: “Hearst and Pulitzer devoted more and more attention to the Cuban struggle for independence, at times accentuating the harshness of Spanish rule or the nobility of the revolutionaries, and occasionally printing rousing stories that proved to be false.” Sound familiar?
A Century of Dishonesty..
“Remember the Maine!” may have been at the height of the yellow journalism era, but it was certainly not the last instance of dishonest reporting in favor of sensational warmongering. During the Spanish Civil War, which saw Nationalist revolutionaries clash with Republicans in the years directly preceding World War II, some Western outlets were criticized for covering the conflict sensationally. The New York Times devoted far more manpower to the war than papers at the time traditionally did, with “highly partisan” perspectives.
George Orwell, who fought alongside Republican forces, wrote in his memoir “Homage to Catalonia” that “for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.”
“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened,” he recalled. “I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’”
Newspaper propagandists’ willingness to cover wars in self-interested ways didn’t always run in the same direction, either. Orwell’s contemporary and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had similar criticism for propagandist writers who downplayed the carnage of World War I, insisting it was “the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.”
Later in the 20th century, The New York Times’ Berlin bureau chief Guido Enderis was providing friendly coverage of Hitler’s Germany, according to writer Ashley Rindsberg’s book “The Gray Lady Winked.” Meanwhile, the paper’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, Rindsberg noted, was downplaying Joseph Stalin’s role in the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine because “at the time, The New York Times was actively pushing for American recognition of the Soviet Union.” President Franklin Roosevelt obliged, recognizing the USSR in 1933.
A more recent example is that of The New York Times and other corporate media outlets reporting baseless stories about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq to gin up support for President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. A year afterward, the Times editors admitted their lopsided reporting on the matter in a lengthy editorial piece.
“We have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,” they wrote. “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
“Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these [Iraqi] exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one,” the editors continued. With the rapid dissemination of sensational photos, videos, and information via social media today, there’s no indication the corporate press is any less immune to disinformation when it fits their narrative.
When you see corporate outlets rushing us into war in Europe with sensational stories and flat-out dishonest polling, think twice. The corrupt media has lied to drag Americans into war before, and none of their recent lies on other issues should incline you to think they won’t do it again.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident immediately comes to mind.
The Truth About Tonkin:
Questions about the Gulf of Tonkin incidents have persisted for more than 50 years. But once-classified documents and tapes released in the past several years, combined with previously uncovered facts, make clear that high government officials distorted facts and deceived the American public about events that led to full U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
On 2 August 1964, North Vietnamese patrol torpedo boats attacked the USS Maddox (DD-731) while the destroyer was in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. There is no doubting that fact.
But what happened in the Gulf during the late hours of 4 August—and the consequential actions taken by U.S. officials in Washington—has been seemingly cloaked in confusion and mystery ever since that night.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2008-02/truth-about-tonkin
Johnson Lied, 55,000 Died
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132 ^ | August 2004 | John Prado
Posted on 8/22/2006, 8:34:54 AM by Hillary’sMoralVoid
Forward: During this election season, you will certainly hear the mantra “Bush lied”. To counter that, here is a REAL example of how intelligence was distorted, resulting in TENS of THOUSANDS of American lives lost.
“The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Later — Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam”
Signals Intercepts, Cited at Time, Prove Only August 2nd Battle, Not August 4; purported Second Attack Prompted Congressional Blank Check for War
Johnson-McNamara Tapes Show READINESS TO ESCALATE, EVEN ON SUSPECT INTEL. TOP AIDES KNEW OF MISTAKEN SIGNALS, but Welcomed Justification for Vote (Emphasis added)
Washington, D.C., 4 August 2004 - Forty years ago today, President Johnson and top U.S. officials chose to believe that North Vietnam had just attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, even though the highly classified signals intercepts they cited to each other actually described a naval clash two days earlier (a battle prompted by covert U.S. attacks on North Vietnam), according to the declassified intercepts, Johnson White House tapes, and related documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Compiled by Archive senior fellow and Vietnam expert John Prados, today’s 40th anniversary electronic briefing book includes Dr. Prados’s detailed analysis of the intercepts - only declassified in 2003 - together with audio files and transcripts of the key Tonkin Gulf conversations between President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The latter are excerpted from Dr. Prados’s book, The White House Tapes (New York: The New Press, 2003). The posting also contains photographs and charts from the Tonkin Gulf incident courtesy of the U.S. Naval Historical Center, a detailed documentary chronology compiled by the State Department’s Office of the Historian for the Foreign Relations of the United States series, a CIA Special National Intelligence on Vietnam.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm
History is repeating.
I’m currently reading “Illusion of Victory: America in WWI”. Wilson’s mania for getting the US to save Europe’s aristocracy from that bloodbath ginned up our press to the point that a white hot hatred for anything German led to the lynching of random and innocent German Americans, in one case pulling a guy jailed for being a German lacking enthusiasm for Wilson’s war, from his cell and lynching him on the spot.
These lynchings were all north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The press in America are the boot lickers and running dog lackeys of the ruling class, AKA the hoarding class.
The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson
National Review ^ | March 16, 2022 | DAN MCLAUGHLIN
Posted on 3/16/2022, 2:41:56 PM by george76
Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents.
Princeton University its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s named press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”
Excerpted:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4047295/posts
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-haters-guide-to-woodrow-wilson/
Copy to: ProgressingAmerica
George W. Bush knocked our nation off path and provided the left with inroads to power with his war mongering lies. The most destructive President in my time.. by miles.
His daddy was no prize, neither.
I fear that GWB’s nephew is on track to upset state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the May 24 runoff election. The name “Bush” still excites many TX Republicans. Hope I am wrong
Thanks Grampa Dave. It is good to see that others know the story.
With everyone in the world and their brother feverishly pushing for a war with Russia, I hope they know something I don’t, like not a single one of Putin’s nukes is operational.
NOTHING excuses the death and destruction being committed by Vladimir Putin - NOTHING!!!
They are all in the biggest Ground Zero of them all. Midtown Manhattan. What makes them think nothing will happen to them?
Absolutely correct, Special.
Which were indeed present until hours before the commencement of hostilities, when they were trucked into Syria.
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