Month: September 2023

Murdoch’s retirement, the toxic empire he built, and the tabloidisation of the media

Rupen Savoulian Corporatism, Media, Murdoch, Uncategorized , ,

The retirement of media magnate Rupert Murdoch has prompted an outpouring of fawning commentary about the man and his media empire. Speculation about which of his children would inherit his multibillion dollar media behemoth, and the conflicts between siblings that would ensue, is rife. What the corporate media are ignoring however, is the sinister and ruthless heart of the media colossus Murdoch constructed.

Murdoch destroyed many lives to get where he is. I have written previously on the Murdochisation of the media, turning journalism into tabloid gossip, which obsessive celebrity culture, free-market zealotry, and pro-war jingoistic propaganda. The media he acquired forms, in the words of John Pilger, a cultural Chernobyl.

It is not only the poisonous role his media organisations have played, and the political influence they wield, which is buried by the congratulatory coverage of Murdoch’s retirement. The methods he used to build a media business model involved smashing working class organisations and families, and left a trail of broken communities. The staggering financial profits of News Corp, however admirable it may be to fans of corporate profit, is built on the bodies of the people struck down by the Wapping conflict.

What is Wapping? A bitter and vicious industrial dispute in 1986, the Wapping issue signalled the ascent of Murdoch, and the irreversible change of the corporatised media into tabloid journalism. Murdoch, already a wealthy man owning a string of high-circulation newspapers, wanted to increase his control of media outlets in Britain. He bought News of the World in 1968, the Sun in 1969, and the Times and other papers in 1981. Already a global media baron, he took it upon himself not just to buy another paper, but to undermine worker solidarity in the print media industry.

A bit of background here is necessary. In 1984-85, the miners strike swept British politics. Divisions were crisscrossing the nation. Murdoch’s newspapers published hate-filled rhetoric about the miners, denouncing them as traitors and hooligans. The print workers, who controlled the linotype typesetting technology used to print the news, refused to print the vicious and scurrilous vitriol of the Murdoch press.

The print workers, showing solidarity with the miners, raised the ire of Murdoch. The latter portrayed the print unions as luddites, wedded to an obsolete technology. To be sure, typesetting was an ancient technology by the 1980s. The print workers, 6000 of them, had spent their working lives with the old typesetting methods. Technology always changes, and we all have to adapt, to be sure.

In the days before computerisation and the internet, people read their news in newspapers. Today, we consume news online and newspaper circulation has declined.

So while the old printing presses had to be changed, and technological innovation implemented, Murdoch’s false portrayal of print workers as technologically resistant diehard Bolsheviks served to disguise his intention to smash working class communities. Taking advantage of the Thatcher government’s anti-union laws, Murdoch went through the motions of negotiations with the printing union. In the meantime, he built his non-union computerised newspaper plant at Wapping, dubbed by journalists as a fortress.

Picket lines were formed, and the dispute escalated. Murdoch chose, not to transition his workforce into new jobs or training, but to smash Fleet Street’s powerful unions. The print workers, 6000 of them, were sacked, and the protesters were isolated. Murdoch and his Tory allies, confronted by a pusillanimous Labour bureaucracy, crushed the print workers, their survival be damned.

Police were deployed to break the bones of the picketers, and break the strike. That victory launched Murdoch as a powerful media mogul not to be trifled with, willing to deploy the resources of the state against his working class opponents.

The former print workers, their jobs lost, went on to succumb to depression, marriage breakdowns, suicide, anxiety and all the ills associated with deindustrialisation.

I am of the computerised, IT generation, and it is incumbent upon people like me to never forget the bitterly divisive origins of today’s IT-driven journalism. The News Corp effect, promoting the neoliberal capitalist ideology of a pure free-market, infects the stories and culture of the Murdoch megalith. The nature of journalism changed, with the promotion of warmongering jingoism, the veneration of wealth acquisition, and the demonisation of the unemployed.

The phone-hacking scandal, with which we are all familiar, is only one part of the Murdoch media’s operating procedures. The victims of the phone-hacking intrusion includes the royals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy personages; people who have the wealth and connections to fight back. News International employees deployed police bribery, the hiring of private detectives, and improper influence in the pursuit of stories.

Murdoch’s improper influence extends well beyond mobile phones and text messages. The concentration of media ownership in fewer hands, increasing the monopolised character of the corporate media, is the scandal about which no-one is talking. Australia has one of the world’s most heavily monopolised corporate media in the world, and Murdoch’s news outlets predominate the market in every capital city, and most regional areas. It is no exaggeration to describe the Australian media landscape as a Murdochcracy.

Is not media monopolisation, and the strict control of news and information, something for which we repeatedly criticised the Communist nations? In fact, with the relentless pursuit of private profit as its stated goal, News Corp and the Murdoch media machine has operated at a loss for decades. Of course, there are periods of profitability. But by its own standards of dedication to efficiency, News Corp entities post huge financial losses nearly every year. In February this year, News Corp announced another round of job cuts in the face of declining revenues.

Murdoch has spent his media career posturing as ‘anti-elite’ and fighting for the average punter. The punters out there, we are told, need a voice like Murdoch to stand up to the elites, you know, Greenies, climate scientists, welfare recipients, single mothers, indigenous people, refugees, workers – in other words the majority of the population. Murdoch’s background reveals the perverse falsity of this claim to represent the ‘ordinary punters’.

As Walter Marsh wrote, while Murdoch thanked the truck drivers, cleaners and camera operators in his resignation speech, he omitted the thousands of printers, typesetters, typists and journalists who were crushed by his steamrolling megalith to make way for the brave new world.

Hailing from a wealthy family, Murdoch went to Geelong Grammar school, and then off to Oxford. He made his first million while he was young – his father died and passed on the family business. However, the real injustice resides in what Pilger calls the media junta. The corporate media, monopolised by a few powerful corporations, have become Roman-like aristocrats of old, only these days the currency of this empire is news information.

Questioning the structure of the media compels us to ask ourselves what kind of society we want to live in.

The dysfunctional politics produced by the 2011 NATO intervention worsened the Libya flood disaster

Rupen Savoulian Libya, middle-east ,

No-one can fail to be moved by the heart-rending pictures emerging from the flood-stricken region of eastern Libya. The flood, the product of a combination of heavy rainfall and poor dam maintenance, is yet further confirmation of the impact of human-induced climate change.

The floods killed thousands of people, with many more more deemed to be missing. The eastern Libyan town of Derna, devastated by the collapse of two dams overwhelmed by Storm Daniel, was basically swept out to sea. The failure of the two Derna dams, plus the severity of the storm, released 30 million cubic metres of water.

The Libyan authorities, woefully underprepared for anything like this, had ample warnings about the decrepit state of Derna’s dams. Meteorologists and on-the-ground workers had repeatedly warned of the devastating consequences of any breach or overflow of the dam structures. The authority in charge of that particular area of eastern Libya, led by former CIA asset General Khalifa Haftar, proved criminally incompetent in handling the tragic fallout.

Climate change driven disasters, such as increasingly severe and frequent weather events, do not constitute entirely surprising news. Storm Daniel, the tropical-like cyclone which struck Libya, had already caused flooding and associated damage in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. The trajectory and long reach of the storm across the Mediterranean, and its severity, were not unanticipated.

Why were the Libyan authorities so unprepared to handle such a serious natural disaster? There are two competing governments in Libya, each defying the other for territorial gain and resources. Why is there no central authority, and why is the nation fractured into feuding regions of warlords and banditry where social services are nonexistent?

Jonathan Cook, veteran Middle East journalist, states out loud what the corporate media does not want to say; Libya was ill-equipped to deal with the flood catastrophe because the society was demolished by the 2011 NATO intervention, spearheaded by Britain and France, backed up by the United States. Libya is a seething cauldron of warring militias, fanatical Islamist groups, and slave traders, precisely because the central authority under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was eliminated.

Protests erupted in Derna at the incompetence of Libyan government officials, and their NATO supporters, to adequately prepare for the eventuality of flooding. The house of Derna’s mayor was burnt down. The protesters read out their demands, including condemnations of the current Libyan authorities reputedly in charge of eastern Libya. Denouncing the NATO intervention of 2011, the workers in Derna demanded an end to the endemic violence, corruption and poverty that has marred the nation since 2011.

Former US President Barack Obama, took to social media exhorting his millions of followers to donate to the Libyan flood relief effort. Commendable sentiments, except for one glaring hypocrisy; his administration, along with Britain and France, did everything they could to militarily intervene in Libya, demolished what was a functional, albeit repressive, centralised state. The 2011 regime change operation, spearheaded by Paris and London, produced a chaotic society, marred by long-festering civil war, rival Islamist militias and grinding poverty.

In 2016, Obama stated that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya, was the biggest mistake of his presidency. First of all, a mistake is an unintended consequence of a course of action; numerous commentators, opponents of imperialist invasion, warned of the harmful consequences of any intervention in Libyan society.

Gaddafi himself had warned, just prior to his death, that any instability in Libya would provide a foothold for extremist Islamist organisations, and be a gateway for sub-Saharan African refugees into Europe. Both his predictions have come to pass. To be sure, seeking asylum is a human right; the ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe is not the claimants sub-Saharan African origins, as far right politicians would have us believe. It is the destructive wars waged by European powers, breaking down the societies from where the outflow of refugees originate.

Secondly and more importantly, the illegal regime change operation in 2011, which began as a purportedly limited ‘no-fly zone’ over the skies of Libya, was never an unintentional event, but a deliberate and calculated criminal war. The politicians who orchestrated this war, including then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are guilty of killing civilians and committing war crimes.

The 2011 NATO foreign intervention, launched on the false and dubious pretext of ‘responsibility to protect’, resulted in the toppling of the Gaddafi regime. Libya had one of the highest literacy rates in Africa; Gaddafi used the oil revenues generated by the state-run company to provide free health care and electricity to Libyan citizens. All that came to a grinding halt in 2011. Gaddafi was murdered by a NATO-backed Islamist lynch mob, and the country descended into chaotic civil war and societal breakdown.

The buildup to the NATO intervention – led by France and the UK, and supported by the United States – was accompanied by a frenzied campaign of disinformation and war propaganda. Lurid stories about Gaddafi encouraging Libyan troops to mass rape rebel women by supplying them with viagra turned out to be false – atrocity propaganda. However, the effects of propaganda outlast the shooting war they are intended to encourage. Fraudulent PR can be recycled through different conflicts, with the intent to build domestic public support for military intervention.

Islamist militias and rival warlords have made a roaring trade in sub-Saharan African slave trading. Post-2011 Libya, hailed by former British prime minister David Cameron as a successful example of human rights interventionism, has seen the return of slave markets.

This gruesome trade in human lives is made possible by the racism of the Libyan militias and warlords who now dominate the country. The supporters of the 2011 NATO intervention were warned about the racist nature of the Islamist militias, yet chose to do nothing. These foot-soldiers of the regime change operation were empowered by their imperialist backers.

It is high time that the perpetrators of the 2011 injustice against Libya were held accountable for the predictable, criminal outcomes of their decisions and actions. If Trump can be impeached because of financial malfeasance and electoral misconduct, why cannot Obama be held accountable for participating in a criminal war launched on fraudulent and duplicitous pretexts?

The catastrophic blasting of Libyan society in 2011 only amplified the climate change-driven disaster in that nation this year. The horrendous legacy of the NATO intervention is never far from the surface. As Jasper Saah writes:

The destruction of the Libyan state in 2011 has had dramatic repercussions for the whole world—a key factor in the destabilization and proliferation of arms in the Sahel to the south. This in turn is intimately connected to the so-called “migrant crisis” that has shaped and molded European politics dramatically toward the right for the last decade.

Bear that in mind when listening to the hypocritical concerns for the Libyan situation expressed by the corporate media.

The September 11 attacks and the forever war on terror – cumulative vengeance and imperial expansion wrapped in a mantle of righteous victimhood

Rupen Savoulian Libya, middle-east , ,

Anniversaries provide us with an opportunity to examine the trajectory of political and economic policies, and evaluate their impacts. No doubt the commemorative activities marking the 22nd anniversary of the horrific 9/11 attacks were emotionally powerful and poignant. However, the practice of ‘never forget’ should not blind us to the fact that the American self-declared ‘war on terror’ is actually an imperial overreach of an economic empire hellbent on expansion.

Indeed, the millions of victims of America’s overseas wars, rationalised as cumulative vengeance, have perpetuated the kind of extrajudicial and extralegal violence that the rulers of the US claim to oppose.

While denouncing the antidemocratic values and socially regressive ideology (allegedly) motivating the Islamist militias who carried out the 9/11 attacks, the American military-industrial complex has implemented the kind of terrorist violence on a global scale it purports to oppose. It has enacted legislation that infringes on the individual liberties and freedoms which are theoretically sacrosanct in a capitalist-based democracy, freedoms which, we are repeatedly told, raise the ire of terrorist organisations.

The way we view migrants from the Middle East, particularly those from Muslim majority nations, shifted in the wake of 9/11. Rather than individuals trying for a better life, we view them as foot soldiers in a collectively radicalised partisan internal column for Islamism. The United States (and Anglophone nations generally), already moving towards surveillance capitalism, implemented intrusive over surveillance and intimidatory policing which targets the Islamic community.

The authorities who inform us that terrorist groups ‘hate our freedoms’ have done their utmost to legislate heavy restrictions on those liberties. Surveillance capitalism has done more to undermine democracy than any putative Islamist conspiracy.

Saudi complicity

The families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks have persisted in asking pointedly relevant questions about the degree of Saudi Arabian complicity in those terrible attacks. This is not to engage in deranged and paranoid conspiracist thinking, but simply to seek answers for the lingering questions regarding culpability for the terrorist atrocity.

Writing in The Intercept magazine, journalists Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, examine the intimate connections between the team of hijackers and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence fraternity. Add to that the ongoing and fruitful cooperation between Saudi intelligence and the American intelligence apparatus, and the questions cut deeper and closer to home.

It is no secret that Osama Bin Laden, hailing from a wealthy family, was tied up with Islamist groups intimately involved with Al Qaeda’s militant activity. While Bin Laden himself was not directly involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks, he praised the attackers and promoted their extremist ideology as a fellow co-thinker. Bin Laden provided funding for the perpetrators of the attack, and identified with the aims of the hijackers.

The Bush family have close business and political connections with the Saudi monarchy and its financial class. George W Bush, president at the time of the attacks, downplayed evidence of Saudi culpability. In fact, Afghanistan, then under the rule of the Taliban, repeatedly offered to hand over Bin Laden – a request routinely refused by Washington. The Bush-Cheney administration wanted to have their quick, little war in Afghanistan, and make a loud demonstration of American power.

That little war lasted twenty years, and ended with the humiliating retreat of US forces from Kabul in 2021.

While copious evidence of Saudi complicity comes to light, nothing is being done to uncover the potentially embarrassing links between Washington and Riyadh in the aftermath of the 9/11 bombings. Class action lawsuits brought by the victims’ families have kept the issue of Saudi involvement close to the surface, but Washington insiders cannot face the prospect of being complicit in such a devastating atrocity.

Not in the name of the 9/11 victims

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, then President Bush gave a speech upholding the example of Abraham Zelmanowitz. The latter, a victim of 9/11, stayed in the collapsing buildings, rather than escape, sacrificing his life to protect his quadriplegic friend. Bush seized on this episode to proclaim its poignancy as demonstrative of the American national character,

Matthew Lasar, Zelmanovitz’s nephew, responded to President Bush’s words in the following way. Lasar is worth quoting at length:

I mourn the death of my uncle, and I want his murderers brought to justice. But I am not making this statement to demand bloody vengeance. . . . Afghanistan has more than a million homeless refugees. A U. S. military intervention could result in the starvation of tens of thousands of people. What I see coming are actions and policies that will cost many more innocent lives, and breed more terrorism, not less. I do not feel that my uncle’s compassionate, heroic sacrifice will be honored by what the U. S. appears poised to do.

Note the prescience of Lasar’s views. His perspective is reflected by the families of the 9/11 victims, whose purpose is to fully uncover Saudi-US intelligence community complicity in these attacks. The families of 9/11 oppose the imperial wars, drone and missile strikes, which have only resulted in innocent casualties and the forcible displacement of millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and other nations around the world.

Scholars at Brown University, as part of the Cost of Wars project, have found that the US post-9/11 wars have killed 4.5 million people and displaced at least 38 million across Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and numerous other nations. When societies are unable to provide conditions of living for their people, malnutrition and child-suffering inevitably follow. The harmful health and economic consequences of conflicts long outlast the actual shooting war.

Let’s listen to the wishes of the 9/11 families, who have denounced the war on terror for producing precisely the outcomes they sought to avoid. Increased mass surveillance, horrifying wars overseas resulting in the destruction of societies and the outflow of refugees, illegal wars of conquest, drone strikes, draconian laws and indefinite detention – the war on terror is based on the values the Anglo-American alliance claims to oppose. It is time to hold accountable the American and British politicians who made such devastating and destructive domestic and foreign policy outcomes – all perversely carried out in the name of the 9/11 families.

50 years since Australia’s withdrawal from Vietnam

Rupen Savoulian Uncategorized

August this year marked fifty years since Australian troops were completely withdrawn from Vietnam. This was in accordance with the American drawdown of military forces at the time. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to the courage and sacrifice of Australian soldiers who served in that conflict. His speech was one of many commemorative activities held across the country regarding the final withdrawal of Australian troops.

While hailing the values of courage and sacrifice is all well and good, Albanese’s perspective serves a definitive political purpose; whitewashing the criminal and predatory nature of the US attack on Vietnam. The courage and sacrifice of soldiers in conflict sounds like a nice, value-free statement – who could dispute that sentiment? Only traitors and scoundrels question the heroism of frontline troops, surely? Such sentiments provide a soft scented candle to mask the odious stench of criminal wars lurking underneath.

PM Albanese, in an attempt to appeal to the normally conservative military lobby, spoke of the suffering of Vietnam veterans, stated that many of them were disrespected and ignored upon returning home. There is no evidence that anti-war demonstrators ever spat at, or hurled abuse at, returning veterans. Many of these myths of the badly-behaved protester are recycled as a way to distract from the criminal and barbaric nature of the assault on Vietnam.

The Vietnam veterans did suffer – from post traumatic stress disorder and various psychological afflictions. These conditions were the result of a predatory war waged by political masters in Washington and Canberra. The short-lived tyrannical republic of South Vietnam, based in Saigon, was propped up by American force of arms. Notorious for torturing and killing prisoners in its ‘tiger cages’, stories about the barbarity of the American backed Saigon dictatorship are overshadowed by the manufactured concern of the obnoxious protester.

The United States undertook military action in Vietnam, not for any humanitarian reasons, or for the dubious claim about promoting democracy and confronting Communism. The US sought to replace France as the preeminent imperial power in Indochina. Having ‘lost’ China itself in 1949 to the Maoist revolution, Washington’s ruling circles were intent on imprinting their own footprint in Vietnam. The latter defeated French colonialism in the 1950s.

Myths about sacrifice and nobility in war become the basis of self-serving fiction. Remembering the Australian troops who served in Vietnam is not a value-free, altruistic exercise motivated by pure dedication to nationalist ideals. Notions of heroic sacrifice for king and country obscure the cynical calculations involved in starting and prolonging imperialist wars. December 2022 was the 50th anniversary of the misremembered and euphemistically named Christmas bombing of North Vietnam.

Why does this Christmas bombing matter? That particular aerial attack, lasting over eleven days in December 1972, is said to have brought Hanoi to the negotiating table to sign a peace deal. That fictionalised memory, which elevates American air power to a decisive factor, not only misrepresents a crucial historical period. It also has provided a misleading influence on American foreign policies.

Peace talks between Hanoi and Washington has been proceeding since the early 1970s. Throughout 1972, the prospects of a peace agreement looks optimistic. The Nixon administration, in an exaggerated sense of aerial ‘military might’, began an intensive bombing campaign against Hanoi and Haiphong. Civilian installation were targeted, including electric plants, hospitals and schools. Operation Linebacker II, as it is officially known, was one of the largest bombing campaigns since the end of World War 2.

The scale of civilian deaths and destruction is difficult to contemplate. The Vietnamese victims of this bombing campaign are largely forgotten. To be sure, the US Air Force experienced heavier than expected losses. Hanoi and Haiphong were well defended by anti-aircraft installations.

What is also forgotten is that the peace agreement, signed by Hanoi in 1973, did not contain any new concessions or changes that had not already been agreed to in October 1972. The war was needlessly prolonged, escalated to new levels of destructive violence, and thousands more Vietnamese suffered the consequences.

This belief in ‘bombing power’ is a self-serving delusion. It has underpinned subsequent US invasions of, and defeats in, Iraq and Afghanistan. What is forgotten in all of the commemorations is that Vietnam veterans joined the anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s and 70s. Rather than being abused or assaulted, civilian demonstrators welcomed the participation of military veterans for the purpose of achieving peace.

The civilian-military divide was overcome precisely in the anti-Vietnam war movement. As the Vietnam conflict wore on, increasing numbers of soldiers questioned the American government and turned to the anti-war campaign. The Pentagon Papers, released by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, exposed a systematic pattern of lying about the conflict on the part of Washington.

In 2019, in an eerie parallel with the earlier Pentagon papers, the Afghanistan papers revealed the systematic deceptions and duplicity of American (and Australian) authorities in covering up the failing war in Afghanistan. Senior military figures questioned not only the motives of the war in Afghanistan, but also expressed alarm that the U.S. government was “failing to tell the truth” – in other words, lying to the public.

As the last American troops madly scrambled to the rooftop of the US embassy in Kabul in 2021, the parallels with the chaotic American retreat from Saigon were unmistakable. In the wake of the defeat of US forces in Afghanistan, serious questions were asked about why we have not learned lessons from similar defeats in Iraq and Vietnam.

In an ironic turn, US President Joe Biden will visit Vietnam for the purpose of strengthening bilateral relations. Following in the footsteps of former president Obama’s pivot to Asia, Biden is hoping to draw Hanoi into its anti-China military alliance. Hanoi, while welcoming reconciliation, strongly rejects any participation in a hostile military bloc against Beijing.

Whitewashing past imperial wars, and recycling durable myths about them, only serves to reinforce Australia’s relegation as a deputy mercenary in America’s criminal wars overseas. It is time to reevaluate our priorities, and take a stand against the wars that make the crimes of Ben Roberts-Smith possible.