Media dishonesty and espionage. Bush is not as bad as Hitler ... he's worse!

Media dishonesty and espionage. Bush is not as bad as Hitler ... he's worse!

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:09:50 -0500
From: Sabina Becker binabecker@sympatico.ca
To: Editor@VHeadline.com
Subject: Right on target!

Just wanted to say your response to Aaron Schoeffler's letter criticizing Mary MacElveen and Oscar Heck was dead-on. If anyone doesn't like what or how those two write, well -- it's labeled as such on the front page, and he doesn't have to read. It shouldn't impair his enjoyment of the rest of the site -- should it?

It certainly doesn't bother me! In fact, their articles are the ones I am most likely to pass along to my friends, because they are so wonderfully frank about what is really going on, whether in Mary's America or Oscar's Venezuela.

I appreciate their honesty and think it's time we saw more, not less, of the same elsewhere in the media. And I say this as one who has studied journalism at university!

Why does anyone believe there is such a thing as "objective" news reporting when a cursory look at history will confirm that it has never even existed?

Even the overtly right-wing FOX News has the gall to pass itself off as "fair and balanced," which it is not.

And if that doesn't drag the discourse down into the realm of the ridiculous, I don't know what does. Already the damage has been done: The mainstream media, trying hard to outdo FOX at its own dishonest game, has sunk beneath all credibility. Even the New York Times has had to admit that it has fallen victim to blatant BushCo lies!

Why, then, pretend that copying their bland style will guarantee objectivity? It does not; nothing does. So, why pretend?

Let me add that the Bush/Hitler comparison is not "devaluing the entire dialogue" at all, but rather, it is apt and accurate. Anyone who thinks otherwise should get his head out of the sand and look around; what he sees might just scare him if he were to look at it honestly.

My parents were children in Hitler's Germany, and my father (who is certainly no socialist) says Bush is not as bad as Hitler -- he's worse!

My dad may be mistaken about a number of things, but not about this one. Not all fascism marches around in jackboots and swastikas. I fear the other kind, the one that wears a bland, smiling face and moves by "moderate"-seeming increments.

Lest anyone forget, Hitler didn't seem so bad either -- at first. And the first people he massacred were not Jews, but the socialists and democrats who were his primary opposition. The death camps could never have been built without an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles pervading all of Germany for several years first.

And what is there now in America, which I recently visited, if not an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles?

"We have to support the president, it's a time of war!" seems to be the prevailing mentality. It is as though the very act of dissent is now treason. And when I hear that the Bush administration has even spied on the peaceful, history-honored Quakers under the pretext of looking for "terrorists," what else is there to assume but that fascism has descended on America in earnest?

Nowadays, by muzzling the media into not reporting or publishing anything too "controversial" (read: HONEST), the job gets done even without midnight "disappearances" of socialists and democrats.

Between media dishonesty and administration espionage, it is to be expected that the opposition simply dries up because its voice is taken away and no one finds it worthwhile to speak out against fascism anymore. It's too scary; you could get spied on. You could get arrested. You could "disappear."

And then, Pastor Niemoeller's famous poem once again comes true.

Only a repeated and diligent application of truth can stop the fascists. After all, they don't scruple to use a repeated and diligent application of lies against anyone who opposes them.

Who will speak out for you when they come to take you, if you do not speak out against them now?

Sincerely,
Sabina C. Becker
binabecker@sympatico.ca