(Headline) "With a “left press” like this, who needs fascist media?" (Lede) "How our “progressive” stars and outlets manage not to say a word about the gravest crisis in the history of humanity", by Mark Crispin Miller, published on Off Guardian on 27 August 2021

 

Source: offGuardian

With a “left press” like this, who needs fascist media?How our “progressive” stars and outlets manage not to say a word about the gravest crisis in the history of humanity

Mark Crispin Miller

It pains me to say it, but Caitlin Johnstone—whose work I used to champion ardently, defending her against the crypto-Stalinists at Counterpunch—is one of many “leftists” who keep partying like it’s 2019.

Same with the interminable Noam Chomsky, The Nation, Consortium News, MoveOn, Popular Resistance, Nation of Change, Covert Action Bulletin, Naomi Klein, Tom Engelhardt and others that I used to champion, and (in some cases) see as friends, as well as outlets that I used to write for.

So Caitlin loves her boomer Dad for his irrepressible outrage over the bombing of Afghanistan, and loves ALL boomers for their fiery dissidence—on issues that don’t matter much at this apocalyptic moment.

From her, and all those other “progressive” voices/outlets, you’d never know that World War III has been raging (openly) since January 2020—a global war against humanity itself.

Someone should tell Caitlin—an Australian!—that those feisty boomers, with some very few exceptions, have turned rigidly authoritarian, and often downright hateful toward the bravest and most necessary dissidents today, standing firm against the bio-fascist mandates of the New World Order, and the looming portents of the Great Reset: dangers that those “leftist” sages never even mention, much less question or confront.

While Caitlin, resident of Melbourne, riffs indignantly about the bombing of Afghanistan back in 19 B.C. (Before COVID), the staunchest dissidents Down Under are the truck drivers threatening to shut that country down, if its cops don’t take their boots off everybody’s necks.

In the midst of this vast slo-mo Holocaust, conducted in the name of “public health” (much as the last one was), we find no reference to it, nor any reference to the unprecedented global wave of censorship on which that Holocaust depends, or to the naked violence of the police throughout the “democratic” West, or to the financial purposes of this whole global nightmare, in any of the “leftist” outlets named above.

Instead, we get “Ban Killer Drones,” “Why US Policy in Nicaragua Isn’t Working,” “America’s Merchants of Death Then and Now” (with no mention of Big Pharma), “Hidden costs of militarism: Climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss,” and (my personal favorite) “Is a Cold War Still Possible in an Overheating World?”

My point is not that such well-worn concerns don’t matter anymore (though some of them were overblown before the COVID crisis), but that they’re now being used by our “left” press to give the misimpression that they’re really on the left — working for peace, freedom, civil rights and economic fairness, always in the interests of the people over all — instead of blinding us to this unprecedented global drive to make those things impossible, and snuff the people out.

Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and the author of several books, including Boxed In: The Culture of TV; Seeing Through Movies; Mad Scientists: The Secret History of Modern Propaganda; Spectacle: Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion; and The Bush Dyslexicon. You can read more of his work through his newsletter, News from the Underground