Media Lens - Yemen Vote - The Responsibility To Protect Profits
A
devastating Media Lens' alert on the selective – and therefore entirely
bogus – compassion of the Blairite wing of the Labour party and the
Blairite wing of the media, exposed by their lack of support for a
motion seeking to restrain Saudi Arabia's rampage against Yemen.
Media Lens:
Time and again, the cry from the political system is: 'We Must Do
Something!' 'We' must save Afghan women from the 'Medieval' Taliban.
'We' must save Kuwaiti new-borns flung from their incubators by Iraqi
stormtroopers. 'We' must save Iraqi civilians from Saddam's shredding
machines. 'We' must save civilians in Kosovo from Milosevic's 'final
solution'.
As for the suffering civilians of Aleppo in Syria,
hard-right MPs like Andrew Mitchell demand, not merely that 'we' save
them, not merely that 'we' engage in war to save them, but that 'we'
must confront Russia, shoot down their planes if necessary, and risk
actual thermonuclear war – complete self-destruction – to save them: 'If
that means confronting Russian air power defensively, on behalf of the
innocent people on the ground who we are trying to protect, then we
should do that.'
State-corporate propaganda is full of 'shoulds',
all rooted in 'our' alleged 'responsibility to protect'. Why 'us'? Why
not Sweden or Iceland? Because 'we' care. 'We' just care more.
A
key task of the corporate media is to pretend this is something more
than a charade. ... The likes of David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, John
Rentoul, Jonathan Freedland and Oliver Kamm earn their salaries by
appearing to tear their hair out in outrage at the crimes of official
enemies and at the 'useful idiocy' of the perennial, naysaying
'leftists'.
