Imperial Hypocrisy and Manufacturing Consent

Worthy vs. Unworthy Victims and the Meaning of "Democracy" in US Propaganda

Let us stop to appreciate the abject hypocrisy of United State foreign policy and foreign affairs media coverage and commentary under Emperor Joe Biden. 

The White House and the US mainstream media (MSM) are properly outraged at the mass civilian casualties caused by Russia’s savage and criminal invasion, bombing, and rocket-barraging of Ukraine. They rightly call the mass murder inflicted by Vladimir Putin heinous, evil, and the like. Any decent human being would do the same.

The United States sends many billions of dollars’ worth of military assistance to Ukraine to fight Russia.  Never mind that Emperor Joe and the US helped provoke Russia’s crime by trying to turn Ukraine into a US-NATO military outpost on Russia’s repeatedly invaded southwest border.  

The White House and the US MSM are correctly outraged by Hamas’s paramilitary murder of 1400 civilians in southern Israel on October 7th.  They rightly describe this crime as evil.  Any decent human being would do the same.

Never mind that the attack was the predictable result of the torture inflicted on more than 2 million Palestinian people stuck in the open-air concentration camp that is the Gaza Strip by the judeo-fascist  occupation and apartheid state of Israel (with the full and massive military support and diplomatic backing of the United States).  As Chris Hedges writes:

“What does Israel, or the world community, expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years; reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level; deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water, and electricity; use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns, and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response? Israel is currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four hours per day.”

Israel responds to Hamas’s attack by promising “mighty vengeance” that will reverberate through the ages.  It imposes a monumentally criminal state of siege on the already deeply impoverished Gazans.  It tells at least a million people in northern Gaza to leave homes Israel begins to demolish from the sky. 

Israel has so far (as of the morning of October 23) killed more than 5000 Gazans, including 2000 children.  It has demolished Palestinian hospitals and mosques along with apartment buildings and whole residential blocks, creating scenes of urban destruction that rival images from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, Fallujah, Grozny, and Bakhmut.  Israel tells Gazans to flee its coming ground invasion even as it bombs the escape routes and makes people too hungry and sick to make off.   And Israel has so far killed at least 90 Palestinian protesters  in the West Bank 

But while the first two crimes elicit extreme moral condemnation along with calls to defend and even avenge the victims from the White House and MSM, things are very different with the third transgression. Even as Israel was committing the latest in its long list of grave offences against Palestine (the “Nakba” that never ended from 1948 to present), Emperor Joe flew to Israel’s capital Tel Aviv to proclaim “unwavering” and escalated backing for the United states’ top military client state, the Judeo-fascist government of Israel, as it committed crimes reminiscent of the Third Reich’s response to the Warsaw ghetto uprising.  Biden then came back to the belly of the imperial beast to make a prime-time Oval Office speech calling for the US to spend $100 billion on the defense of “democracy” against authoritarian aggression in Ukraine, Taiwan, and above all Israel-Palestine. Along the way he has ordered two major US naval and air war flotillas to the Middle East to deter any regional actors from stepping in to defend the people of Palestine against Israel’s naked, genocidal aggression.

Throughout, Emperor Joe has played along with Israel’s and Zionists’ preposterous equation of tiny Hamas with the Nazi Third Reich, which stood atop one of the world’s great industrial powers and conducted a massive industrial-style genocide against European Jewry during World War II.  Biden here is collaborating with Israel’s longstanding propaganda that uses a past racist Holocaust to justify its racist Holocaust.

The MSM has chimed in with a steady drumbeat of justification, rationalization, and normalization for Tel Aviv’s crimes. It can’t hide the fact that Israel is undertaking a wildly disproportionate response that is slaughtering masses of innocent Gazan civilians, but it reports and comments on this horror without anything like moral outrage it has directed at Russia and Hamas. Regarding Gazan victims, the US MSM attitude is “it’s terrible but unavoidable.  Too bad, so sad for all the collateral damage but this is what Israel obviously can and must do to root out Hamas.”  It regularly likens little Hama to the once mighty Nazi regime, which in 1941 controlled most of Europe from the English Channel to Ukraine.  

Even as the Gazan body count has doubled, then tripled the October 7^th death total – we can  expect at least 50,000  Gazan deaths before Israel’s bloodlust is slaked – the MSM has bombarded Americans with highly personalized and outrage-evoking stories about Israeli and US victims of the Hamas attack while paying comparatively slight, depersonalized, and normalized attention to the “too bad” and “oh well” Palestinian tragedies.

It's straight out of Noam Chomsky and the late Edward S. Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent.  Decades ago, Chomsky and Herman rigorously analyzed the difference between those who qualify as “worthy victims” and those relegated to “unworthy victims” status in the US MSM.  The distinction comes down to a basic criterion: which side of The American Empire Project the victims of state and military violence stand on.  The three groups with whom Biden aligned US in defense of “democracy” during his primetime address last week – Ukrainians, Israelis, and Taiwanese – all reside on Washington’s geopolitical side in that regard.  This makes their victimization officially deserving of empathy and US military support in the dominant US media and politics culture. 

The Palestinians are considered on the wrong side of US imperial alignments and thus are denied worthy victimhood status and a legitimate claim to protection in that imperial culture.  (This is why occupied Palestine’s youth have long been depicted in US MSM as “terrorists” for throwing stones at the Israeli “Defense” Forces [IDF] while Hong Kong and Myanmar youth have been portrayed as heroes for throwing stones at Chinese and Burmese gendarmes.)

“Democracy,” the value that Biden says allies the US with Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan?  How absurd for a US president to identify himself, his country, and US policy with democracy – the US Founders’ ultimate nightmare – of all things.  Forget for now, if you can, that the US is an abject class dictatorship and plutocracy enabled by a right-tilted slaveowners’ and imperialist constitution that violates the elementary democratic principle of one personal vote on numerous levels. Forget that Israel’s current head of state is an arch-authoritarian atop a genocidal fascist party that recently rolled back his nation’s bourgeois democracy, sparking mass internal demonstrations by suppressing the autonomy of Israel’s judiciary. Put that and the capitalist authoritarianism and corruption of Ukraine and Taiwan aside for the moment and reflect on how Biden has as US president flown to Saudi Arabia to fist bump the blood-soaked rulers of the most reactionary government on Earth, the absolutist be-header regime in Riyadh.  Forget that the number five recipient of US military aid (Israel is number one by far and away) is the brutal dictatorial regime one nation south – Egypt.  Forget that the US under Emperor Joe has encouraged a military coup against the democratically elected prime minster of Pakistan, Imran Kahn punishment for his insufficient alignment with the aforementioned empire project. Forget that US capitalism-imperialism (including Biden’s continuation of vicious US sanctions on Venezuela) is the main and undemocratic force behind the Latin American misery that causes the southern border crisis that Biden is responding to with an iron nativist fist,  breaking yet another progressive-sounding campaign promise by continuing the building of Amerikaner fascist leader Donald Trump’s sick southern border wall.

The ”democratic” world is for the reigning US media politics culture that part of the planet seen by elite Washington as aligned with US capitalism-imperialism. Worthy victims are aligned with Uncle Sam.  Unworthy victims are those seen as either against the USA or as incidental to US interests.

This insidious Orwellian framing is part of how “our” ruling class strives to engineer mass obedience to US imperialism. It’s nothing new, though the hypocrisy seems on steroids at present. It is being demonstrated on a scale that ought to be provoking mass protest and rebellion in US streets and public squares. Any government that bankrolls, equips, and protects what Israel is doing to Gaza right now deserves to be brought down by a mass uprising and revolution in its own country.