Youtube University


Today I visited Youtube and browsed around a little bit. I realized that anyone who's interested can use Youtube for deep background on current affairs. Two of the books I think should be required background material for anybody who is expressing an opinion on the war in Iraq, or the threats against Iran, are Stephen Kinzer's "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq," and, "All the Shaw's Men." For an overview of Kinzer's journalism, there are videos on Youtube.

Kinzer is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and provides excellent background material to demonstrate that there was a democratic government in Iran in 1953, when we overthrew it and installed the Shaw as a favor to British Petroleum. The practice of "regime change" began during the Eisenhower administration, with the complicity of the Dulles brothers, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA, and John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State.

After the success in toppling the democratic government in Iran, by convincing President Eisenhower that the country was in danger of going communist, the brothers turned their attention to overthrowing the government of Guatemala, as a favor to the United Fruit Company.

The American news networks do not give this kind of background when there is a controversy, for example, when Reverend Wright says that "America's chickens are coming home to roost," it is the rare journalist in the mainstream press who asks, "Is there some validity to this point of view? Have we been responsible for people in other countries suffering and dying as we destroyed democracies and installed dictators who would do what we wanted? They talk about Obama going to school in Indonesia but they don't talk about the CIA coup there and the carnage it wrought.

And of course there's Vietnam. You can find background on the CIA activity there but I don't include the Phoenix Program videos because I haven't watched all of them. But it's common knowledge that the CIA had DIem assassinated.

We're taught that we had to bomb civilians to stop the war with the Japanese, but why did we have to drop it on major population centers just to demonstrate its power? We decided that civilians didn't matter. And it seems like that's the same policy we had in Iraq.

So the argument that madmen hate us for our freedom is devious because it is one-sided. I think we have to balance the heroic history which says we are always the good guys, with some objective information about why our reputation in the world has been on the decline since the instigation of the policy of ruling the world by proxies installed through regime change.

The war in Iraq served to provide permanent bases in the Middle East, because things were getting complicated in Saudi Arabia. It also provided a place to launder huge amounts of cash. The number of people killed has been minimally reported with the complicity of the press. (This requires some patience to watch but it demonstrates the problem with the American press.)

Even for people who don't care enough to read books and get the other side of the story about what our government is doing, there isn't a lot of effort required to go on youtube and start discovering why we should not be sweeping these things under the carpet.

Maybe the furor over Reverend Wright should be shared by a furor over the failure of the press to provide the historical background for the news. On the other hand you might want to forget about injustice and troll for some really interesting English humor.

Posted: Fri - March 21, 2008 at 08:00 PM