donderdag 9 december 2021

Counter Punch

FEATURE ARTICLES

Conspiracy Theories and Tragedy in Douma, Syria

Part One

On April 7, 2018, two Syrian Air Force Mi-8 Helicopters were spotted departing from Dumayr airbase towards the besieged Damascus suburb of Douma, which was in the final days of a years-long conflict between the Assad regime and various rebel groups, most prominently the Saudi-backed extremist faction Jaysh Al Islam. The group was known colloquially for Zahran Alloush, the despised warlord who ruled Douma and Eastern Ghouta with an iron fist until his assassination in a 2015 airstrike. The impoverished suburbs of Damascus had been among the first to rebel against the regime of Bashar al Assad when the Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria in 2011. By 2012 the Syrian regime had been ejected or withdrawn from much of Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Homs, Afrin, and Idlib.

Millennials: The Generation in Waiting

BY SCOTT REMER

Reading history books when I was younger, I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Europeans living in the first half of the 1800s, the revolutionaries manqué. I pitied those frustrated young reformers whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution, only to be crushed under Napoleon’s boot, then ground into the dirt by decades of repression and dictatorship during Metternich’s Congress of Europe. I sympathized even more with socialists forced to flee their homes after the failed revolutions of 1848, never to return. Living in anticipation of an epochal event, gathering your resources, saving everything up for the grand act, striking, then realizing, to your increasing horror, that you’ve failed and your window of opportunity has closed...then suffering the calamity of exile, or worse, the agony of remaining and watching your home become unrecognizably foreign: such a disaster was hard to fully imagine. The benefit of centuries passing is that you can pretend that history is safely squared away, something that happens to hapless people in the past, not to you. But those reformers’ unenviable fate—watching helpless and horrified as the world morphs into something disfigured almost beyond recognition—is what my generation, the millennials, is suffering today. Yes, those millennials, over whom so much ink has been spilled in condescending attempts at psychoanalysis penned by septuagenarian op-ed columnists. Ordinarily, I’m skeptical about making age-based generalizations: culturally and politically conservative millennials rarely get attention because they don’t fit the stereotype. And I’m very sympathetic to the idea that generational politics is a “socialism of fools” which misidentifies age as the essential political fault line rather than class. Age and class overlap, but class structure underlies our economy’s woes. Plenty of leftists above thirty-five possess a millennial ethos despite not technically being millennials. This isn’t a case of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

The White Supremacy Lie

The Rittenhouse Trial and Rightwing Media Fabrication

BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

It is an old canard pushed by rightwing pundits and officials that the U.S. media are “liberally biased.” This narrative again returned in Greenwald and Carlson’s conversation about news reporting on the Rittenhouse trial. But there’s little reason to take this rhetoric seriously. As an expert on political communication who’s spent the last two decades studying the question of political and ideological bias in U.S. media, and as someone who’s written 11 academic books on the topic, I can confidently say there’s been virtually no evidence presented by scholars of a pervasive liberal media bias. There’s plenty of research identifying an official source bias more generally. For example, my own research finds that journalists’ privileging of specific partisan sources shifts depending on which party controls government, with the media favoring Republicans when they control Congress and the White House, with coverage favoring Democrats when they control these branches, and with reporting split between coverage of both parties when control of the branches is divided between Democrats and Republicans. Journalists have even admitted to favoring the in-power party in their reporting, as they recently moved to privilege the Democratic Party in its maneuvering on Congressional spending bills, while ignoring the Republicans due to their minority status in government.

Not “A Nation of Immigrants”

BY BEN TERRALL

John F. Kennedy’s short book A Nation of Immigrants was first published in 1958, then reissued to wide acclaim after Kennedy’s assassination. That bestseller’s valorization of the immigrant experience became a staple of academic instruction in the 1960s. But in my elementary school classes in the early ‘70s I couldn’t help noticing that the only immigrants I heard about were white. My sixth and seventh-grade history classes seemed to mostly consist of tracking the routes of European explorers and conquistadores, with not even a passing mention of slavery or the attempted annihilation of Native Americans. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion is here to counter the orthodoxy that has prevailed in the years since the publication of JFK’s essay. Dunbar-Ortiz has written a number of important books, including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005) and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (20018); on the back cover of this latest work, the author Ishmael Reed describes her as “a one-woman wrecking ball against the tower of lies erected by generations of official and television historians — people who make a living glorifying slave traders and exterminators of Native Americans.” She is also a meticulous researcher who consulted an impressive number of primary and secondary sources in putting together Not “A Nation of Immigrants”. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn’t pull any punches but her arguments are always firmly rooted in the historical record.