[Peace] News from Neptune on UPTV, Friday 5 September 2014

Mon Sep 8 14:09:57 EDT 2014

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN_CSkdpE9I

A Reign of Terror Edition

{INTRO} Good evening, and welcome to News from Neptune for the 36th week of 2014.

~For more than twenty years, this program has been "a spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media" - first on a so-called "community radio station" - and, when censored & locked out of there - welcomed, I'm happy to say, by the good people at Urbana Public Television.

~ I’m Carl Estabrook. My discussants tonight are David Green & Ron Szoke.

~ Our program's name, News from Neptune, was chosen to honor Noam Chomsky, who has been talking sense about American politics for twice the quarter-century we've been on the air.

Chomsky has said that in the American media, “either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune.”

Our format is to take turns suggesting stories that have been ignored or misreported (occasionally even innocently) and then having our colleagues comment on them.

Previous programs are archived on YouTube and posted to the facebook page for News from Neptune, where you’ll also find comments from viewers (not all unadulterated praise) and some answers from us. I also can be reached at <carl at newsfromneptune.com>; I'm happy to receive your comments.

Today is September 5, 2014. On this day in 1793, the "reign of terror" during the French Revolution began. It lasted ten months, until the coup of 27 July 1794, led to the Thermidorian Reaction. The ROT was “a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of 'enemies of the revolution.' The death toll ranged in the tens of thousands, with 16,594 executed by guillotine (2,639 in Paris), and another 25,000 in summary executions across France.”

Mark Twain, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); cf. George Orwell, "The Licensed Jester" <http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/twain/english/e_twain>:

"Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

A modern example of Twain's juxtaposition (which may not be quite fair to the thousand years of victories by direct producers: see now Peter Linebaugh, "The Magna Carta Manifeso: Liberties and Commons for All" [California UP 2008]): 

Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen compared post-independence India and Communist China, covering the years 1949 to 1979. Sen concluded that capitalist social policy in India had killed more than 100 million people, a total exceeding the deaths caused by ALL Communist states after 1917, including the mass famine in China in the late 1950s.

The upcoming 9/11 anniversary reminds us that when the US government says "terror," they usually mean the armed opposition of the rest of the world to American imperialism. 

CHOMSKY: 'I have been writing about international terrorism ever since Reagan declared a war on terror in 1981. In doing so, I have kept to the official definitions of "terrorism" in US and British law and in army manuals, all approximately the same. To take one succinct official definition, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." Everything I have just described, and a great deal more like it, falls within the category of terror ism, in fact state-directed international terrorism, in the technical sense of US-British law. For exactly that reason, the official definitions are unusable. They fail to make a crucial distinction: the concept of "terrorism" must somehow be crafted to include their terrorism against us, while excluding our terrorism against them, often far more extreme. To devise such a definition is a challenging task. Accordingly, from the 1980s there have been many scholarly conferences, academic publications, and international symposia devoted to the task of defining "terrorism." In public discourse the problem does not arise. Well-educated circles have internalized the special sense of "terrorism" required for justification of state action and control of domestic populations, and departure from the canon is generally ignored, or if noticed, elicits impressive tantrums.'

One place the term is used - perhaps inadvertently - was in the famous NYT puff-piece on how Obama was fighting "terrroism." (“A Measure of Change: Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will.” By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE. Published: May 29, 2012).

White House aides described “Terror Tuesday," the day each week when President Obama picks out some people to be murdered by drones or US death squads (the "special operations command”). The president's underlings - notably CIA director John Brennan - compile a list of who should be executed, and the president then chooses from "baseball cards" who will die. The assassinations are carried out in secrecy - the administration doesn't release accounts of the people they kill - but literally thousands of men, women, and children have been killed on Obama's order. Most Americans don't know that the US is running this terrorist program. 

Obama's "rain" of terror (cf. "reign" from regnum = rule) is to precipitate death from the sky - including on American citizens - at long distance, via drones - thus reducing American "boots on the ground" at the cost of criminal "collateral damage."

Obama has killed 5,000 people by drones alone - including 200 children. 

You’re watching News from Neptune, a reign/rain of terror edition...

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