Since fascism is a sign of capitalism in crisis, the interests of business versus wage-worker come into even sharper conflict, creating the need for the corporate-spokesmen (government) to resort to ever greater aggression, lies, and demagoguery

The confusion and fear involved in the often cartoonish ‘war on terror’ is a necessary policy— society has not suddenly become irrational and crazy, but hysteria and fear are the last remaining tools of government to foment war and mask social reality.

If in fact the ‘war on terror’ is a ploy by the elite to hide the class divisions of society, the specific propaganda techniques used to promote the farce should work directly to achieve these aims.

As it turns out, the inner workings of the ‘war on terror’ abide by all the effective techniques employed by the earlier fascist regimes, adjusted only slightly for context. The goal is a subservient, class-blind society.

At its foundation, the ‘war on terror’ intends to give all Americans a common cause; this is done most effectively by promoting nationalism, or patriotism.   more »

Reality TV turns nobodies into stars. Spoof internet music videos garner millions of viewers. In the age of interactive television and user-generated online content, just about anyone can be - and has been - a star.

An even greater challenge to TV and its notions of celebrity may come from technology. Video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video mean that homemade clips can be seen by millions, creating instant - and usually short-lived - global phenomena.

"In this type of world everyone is a celebrity," Marissa Mayer, Google 's vice-president of search products and user experience, told delegates on Saturday.

"You can thank us for it or not, but it does cause things like a David Hasselhoff video to be the biggest video in the world."   more »

>Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in several cities on the West Coast.

In the wake of 9/11, she later wrote, “these people to whom I was listening — in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle — were making connections I had not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between [the American] political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take and was in fact already taking.

"These people recognized that even then, within days after the planes hit, there was a good deal of opportunistic ground being seized under cover of the clearly urgent need for increased security.

"These people recognized even then, with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that the words ‘bipartisanship’ and ‘national unity’ had come to mean acquiescence to the administration’s preexisting agenda...”   more »

Gaza is dying. The Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people are on the edge of starvation.

Here on the shores of the Mediterranean a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq.

A whole society is being destroyed. There are 1.5 million Palestinians imprisoned in the most heavily populated area in the world.

Israel has stopped all trade. It has even forbidden fishermen to go far from the shore so they wade into the surf to try vainly to catch fish with hand-thrown nets.

Many people are being killed by Israeli incursions that occur every day by land and air.   more »

The American people want the news. They want to know what is going on and they want to be well informed. This explains the explosion of new-related web sites on the internet.

It is impossible to be an informed citizen by watching network news. The business-friendly script is carefully edited to portray America’s activities around the world in a positive light.

This produces coverage which is invariably sympathetic to US foreign policy goals and lacks objectivity or depth.

For the last decade or so, it didn’t matter what network broadcast one watched, the lead stories and commercial breaks were featured at just the same time, from just the same ideological perspective, using just the same talking points and buzzwords to present a solid wall of disinformation which was intended to overpower the viewer into believing that “this is the news”.   more »

9 SEPTEMBER

Maureen Dowd: The Unslammed Phone - ABC’s Tarted-Up 9/11 Movie

Vote Republican! Spread the War!

Blair: Dead Duck Still Quacking

Repackaging the 'War on Terror': Myths, Spin and Peddling Hate

Afghanistan: The Opium War

John Tierney: Waiting for Al Qaeda - Hyping Terror to Justify War