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context....https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/20/watch-cn-live-brics-rising/ Vijay Prashad: A World Without Context
Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship. And it eliminates knowledge and wisdom.
By Vijay Prashad
Reading legacy Western media – which dominates the world information order – is painful. During the genocidal war against Palestinians, for instance, these media outlets (such as CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and Bild) have been unable to bring themselves to describe the Israeli military’s attacks on Palestinians. At most, and when it suits them, they resort to passive voice (“Palestinians die”) or to a dangerous form of turning civilian areas into military targets (“Hezbollah village” or “Hamas command and control centre”). A study of mainstream U.S. print media coverage during the first six weeks of the genocide in Gaza showed that “for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times.” In other words, in mainstream media, an Israeli who dies will be mentioned 16 times more than a Palestinian who dies. This trend, which erases and dehumanises Palestinian casualties, seems to have accelerated as the number of Palestinians killed has increased exponentially, with an estimated 114,000 dead. There is no excuse for this abysmal coverage, which ignores the steady stream of information provided by the live reporting of a large number of Palestinian journalists and social media users in Gaza, at great risk to their lives, as well the deeper context for the U.S.-Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocidal war provided by a wide range of analysis. Television programmes are worse, with any critic of the genocide forced to make an admission (“I condemn the 7 October attack by Hamas” or “I condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine”) before the conversation can proceed, and, since many critics do not want to frame the discussion around this condemnation, the conversation never proceeds. [See: AS`AD AbuKHALIL: Do You Condemn Israel?] This ritual act of condemnation is not merely an entry ticket into a conversation but an ideological concession that narrows the space for a genuine debate about the facts of when conflicts and crises begin, how to understand the structure of a conflict, and how best to ascertain the paths forward based on this longer-term historical and structural assessment. This type of discussion is called a conjunctural analysis, which provides political and social movements with the materials to intervene to shape the future and grounds the work of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. This article will introduce you to four texts that are based on conjunctural analyses, but first I want to explain what such an analysis entails. The problem with information these days is not only its content, but equally its form. The velocity of information is striking, making it near impossible for a concerned person to discern both what is significant and what is true. Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship, exhausting the reader and viewer into submission. What is censored is not only information itself, although that does occur more than we admit, but also knowledge and wisdom. The news remains at the level of it happened, without explaining most of what happened at all: it does not explain why it happened, what caused it to happen, or its possible consequences. This form of reporting lies by omission, as events are neither static nor singular but part of a complex process. Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:
Tricontinental’s Asia, Africa, and Latin America offices recently published four texts based on conjunctural analyses:
I will write about each of these texts at greater length in the coming months, as their depth and quality help us navigate beneath the superficiality and sensationalism that typically define analyses of the present. For instance, Maskey’s intervention about the Nepali government’s acceptance of a U.S. government grant elucidates the dynamic structure of the U.S.-imposed New Cold War on Asia, while Hanna Eid’s assessment of the Alliance of Sahel States (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) enables us to understand the fight for sovereignty across West Africa as a whole. The report on the war on drugs provides a window into the pressures upon the government of President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, which requires an acknowledgment of the role of the lucrative international drug mafia in the country’s political establishment. Years ago, I visited the Zacapa barracks, about two hours east of Guatemala City. The scene at the barracks was near-idyllic, its stone walls surrounded by green pastures, yet the sinister watch towers hinted of the bloodshed that took place here: this is where Nora Paiz Cárcamo (1944–1967), Otto René Castillo (1934–1967), other members of the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and about a dozen peasants were brutally tortured and burned alive. Both Nora and Otto were members of the communist movement that fought against the Guatemalan dictatorship; trained in the German Democratic Republic and Soviet Union, respectively; and joined the armed struggle in the Sierra de las Minas (named for the mines of jade, marble and asbestos), where they were killed in March 1967. Later, Nora’s mother, Clemencia Cárcamo Sandoval, told the truth commission that her daughter’s bloody, fractured corpse was found with clubs fused into it, a sign of how brutally she had been beaten. Two years before he was murdered alongside his comrades, Otto, whose beautiful poems were inspired by the El Salvadoran guerrilla poet Roque Dalton (1935–1975), wrote an elegy to “apolitical intellectuals”: I One day, They will be asked No one will ask them II On that day III Apolitical intellectuals A vulture of silence Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/19/vijay-prashad-a-world-without-context/
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At least 87 killed or missing after Israeli strikes on north Gaza, Palestinian officials say
At least 87 people were killed or remain missing after Israeli strikes on northern Gaza overnight and on Sunday, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which said that an additional 40 people were wounded in strikes on Beit Lahiya. The Israeli military said it had carried out a precise strike on a Hamas target in the town.
https://www.france24.com/en/
A day after French President Emmanuel Macron accused ministers, journalists and commentators for distorting remarks he made on Israel being created by the UN, he faced accusations of trying to squash reporting to a mere reproduction of the presidential palace's press releases.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241018-angry-macron-blasts-media-over-reporting-of-israel-comments
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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.