Eric Zuesse
I earlier reported that in an interview with Spanish newspapers published October 31st,
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned U.S. President Barack
Obama’s demand that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from
office, and Moon said: “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” However, it turns out (and I didn’t know this at that time) that he also said the same thing in a separate forum
on October 31st: a news conference at the U.N. in Geneva, held jointly
with the head of the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The present news-report integrates both of those statements from Ban.
(This has not been done before, but should be; so, part of this article
will repeat from that earlier one.)
The U.N. headlined, “Ban
Ki-moon (UN Secretary-General) and Peter Maurer (ICRC) on the world’s
humanitarian crises – Media Stakeout (Geneva, 31 October 2015).”
The 23-minute news-conference video there included him saying (13:50):
“I believe that the future of Syria, or the future of the peace talks, …
should not be held up by an issue of the future of one man. I believe
that it is up to the Syrian people who have to decide the future of
President Assad.”
This assertion by the U.N. Secretary
General directly contradicts the repeatedly stated position of U.S.
President Barack Obama, who insists that Assad must be removed from
office and promptly be replaced by someone whom the President of the
United States finds to be acceptable to serve as Syria’s leader — that
this be done even before the war against ISIS is won. (Is Obama perhaps
hoping that ISIS will help Obama to take down Assad? Is he perhaps
actually viewing ISIS as being an ally?)
Here is the entire quotation of the similar statement that Mr. Ban made that day to Spanish newspapers and which was quoted at El Pais (as translated by me): “The future of President Assad must be decided by the Syrian people.
Now, I do not want to interfere in the process of Vienna, but I think
it is totally unfair and unreasonable that the fate of a person
[diplomatese here for: U.S. President Barack Obama’s demand that Assad
be removed from the Presidency of Syria] to paralyze all this political
negotiation. This is not acceptable. It’s not fair. The Syrian
government insists that Assad should be part of the transition. Many
Western countries oppose the Syrian government’s position. Meanwhile, we
lost years. 250,000 people have been killed. There are 13 million
refugees or internally displaced. Over 50% of hospitals, schools and
infrastructure has been destroyed in Syria. You must not lose more time.
This crisis goes beyond Syria, beyond the region. It affects Europe. It
is a global crisis.”
The U.N. Secretary General is here
implicitly blaming all of this — lots of blood and misery — on U.S.
President Obama, and (in the Spanish newspaper interview) on the “many
Western countries” who ally with him and have joined with him in
demanding regime-change in Syria.
Mr. Ban’s U.N. press conference
also, just like the Spanish-newspapers’ interview published the same
day, showed him saying (16:15): “We are deeply concerned about the
disrespect on international humanitarian law.” He cited there two
specific examples, as back-up for his claim of illegality: the U.S.
attack on a hospital in Afghanistan, and the Saudi attack on a hospital
in Yemen. (The U.S. is allied with the Sauds, who are using U.S. bombs
to destroy their neighbor Yemen. The U.S. is additionally allied with
the Sauds against Syria, Iran, and Russia.) “That’s a crime against
humanity,” Ban asserted. He urged that there be internationally credible
independent investigations performed of those events, and that the
guilty parties then must face justice for their “crime against
humanity.”
Of course, as I noted when first reporting this matter of Ban’s statement on Syria (the statement in El Pais),
the position of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been, and is, to
the exact contrary of Obama’s: namely, that only an election by the
Syrian people can determine whom Syria’s President should be. The U.N.
Secretary General is here — twice in one day, moreover — agreeing with
Putin, and rejecting Obama’s demand, that the matter be determined
instead by non-Syrians, and by non-democratic means (which is basically
like George W. Bush did in Iraq, and like Barack Obama did in Libya).
And the U.S. pretends to be a ‘democracy’, and accuses Russia’s government of being anti-democratic.
Suckers in the West fall for the Western
aristocracies’ line that Putin and not Obama is wrong on this and is the
cause of the dragged-out Syrian war. Such fools don’t even ask
themselves whether in this dispute it is Obama, or instead Putin, who is
supporting the most basic democratic principle of all: self-rule by the
people. But the average individual is that manipulable: so manipulable
as to think that black is white, and white is black; that good is bad,
and bad is good. Totally manipulable.
For example, in a reddit discussion of my
earlier news story on this matter, a typical reader-comment was
ad-hominem against the website: “This site is trash.” Then, he seconded
someone else’s asserting “that the Spanish media is Jewish controlled.”
That was both anti-Semitic and also ad-hominem against the newpaoper, El Pais,
which quoted Ban there. Another reader-comment was instead ad-hominem
against the author: “I don’t know if he’s (Zuesse) Zionist or not but
his other articles and books scattered across the web show a
demonstrable liberal bias.” (As if Zionism isn’t far-right, not ‘liberal’ at all. And as if I’m even relevant to this news-report, at all.)
Obviously, neither reader possessed the intelligence to click onto the
article’s links and to check to see whether its sources are reliable and
were accurately represented in the news-report that they were
supposedly commenting upon there. It’s easy to make suckers of lots of
people, if lots of people have never learned how to think — but only what to think. And that’s precisely the type of ‘education’ one should expect to prevail in a dictatorship (such as the U.S. now is).
The Ban interview was buried by Spanish
newspapers, because the Spanish government is allied with the United
States. For example, the most prominent Spanish newspaper to publish
even quotations from this interview is El Pais, and their headline for the story was “Catalonia is not among the territories with the right to self-determination.”
Even there, the headline was false. What Ban actually said instead, on
that issue of the Catalonian independence movement, was: “The Catalan
question is a very delicate matter and, while the UN Secretary General,
I’m not in a position to comment on that because it is a purely internal
matter.” Lies and distortions in the Western ‘news’ media are that
routine: so obvious, sometimes, virtually any intelligent reader can
easily recognize that he’s reading lies and propaganda (like in that
‘news’ story).
El Pais actually
buried the part about Assad and Obama (the blockbuster in their entire
story) near the end, but not at the very end, of its report, because one
of the standard things that ‘news’ media do when they want to
de-emphasize a particular point is to bring the matter up near the end
but not at the end. To place it at the
end, would emphasize, instead of de-emphasize, the given point: it’s
not the professional way to bury news. Knowledge of how to bury news is
important for the managers of any ‘news’ medium, because such knowledge
is essential in order to make the medium achieve the objectives of the
medium’s owner, the propagandistic function, which is the main reason
why wealthy people buy major ‘news’ media, and why major corporations
chose to advertise in (and thereby subsidize) these media (which
increases that given ‘news’ medium-owner’s income).
As to why the managers (including editors) of El Pais wanted their ‘reporter’ to misrepresent Ban as being opposed to Catalan independence, the reason is that the owners of El Pais
are opposed to Catalan independence. It’s not only in the editorials.
With very few exceptions, a newspaper’s editorials and its ‘news’
reporting are slanted the same way. However, sometimes, for particular
reasons, the editorial position is instead slanted the opposite way from
the ‘news’ ‘reporting.’ Public relations, or PRopaganda, is a science,
not for amateurs. And a major function of management is to apply that
science so as to maximize value for the medium’s owners. It’s like any
business, but the press is also part of the business of government:
moulding the public’s opinions so as to serve the needs of the
aristocracy that owns the vast majority of the nation’s wealth. The idea of ‘the free press’ is itself PRopaganda. In reality, the press is far from free.
Anyway, Ban ki-Moon took a rare
courageous position here, and did it twice on one day, concerning the
same issue; so, he must feel very strongly about this particular matter.
What he said was correct, though it’s virtually unmentionable in the
West. For example: how widely is this news-report being published? Like its predecessor
(which was published only at washingtonsblog, RINF, smirkingchimp,
russia-insider, zerohedge, greanvillepost, and liveleak), this report is
being submitted to virtually all national news-media in the U.S. and in
several other Western countries. You can google the headline, “Twice in
One Day, Ban Ki-Moon Condemned Obama’s Actions on Syria,” to find out
how many (and which ones) are actually publishing it.
Here is a reader-comment following the post of the earlier version of this news-article at ZeroHedge:
——
“…You can google the headline, “Ban Ki
Moon Condemns the American Stand on Syria, Endorses Putin’s” to find
out how many (and which ones) are actually publishing it…”
True, but Googling that specific title mostly brings back Eric’s article or sites that published his article.
Even more interesting is to Google a less specific version, say “Ban ki moon syria putin” to see if any MSM mentions it. Here’s that search limited to the past 24 hours. Let’s see how global journalism rates.
Plenty of references again to Zuesse’s article on those suspicious ‘alternative’ sites or Reddit.
The first ‘MSM’ smelling result is Voice of America — not really MSM, but the ‘official’ U.S. propaganda mouthpiece. Let’s see what they say. They do mention Ban Ki-moon, but only give a remark he made, “…U.N.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Saturday that he welcomed
international talks on Syria, but that they should not be hung up over
what should happen to President Bashar al-Assad…” Hmm, that seems
kind of indefinite, like he could really mean that Assad is disposable.
That’s pretty different from his clear admonition (which VOA ignored)
that the Syrian people should decide. You know — democracy. So VOA fails
(oh, the irony), but we could already assume that.
The next result is the irritating-as-f—k ‘NYT search results’ page. Thanks, useless evil Google. Wading through the trash, the first article seems the most relevant: U.N. Chief Says World’s Failure to Act on Suffering Is a ‘Disgrace’.
It starts out with Moon’s general condemnation of the inhumanity and
violence, but after a few paragraphs points out the recent Syrian
missile attack against the opposition in Douma as an example. Then a
little click-for-graphic thing which tries to show how people were dying
in the conflict and makes a weak attempt at describing actions by both
sides, but each graphic or picture is designed to emphasize the Syrian
government’s culpability for deaths. Coming back from that propaganda
side-track, the article finally quotes Moon, “…Commending their
initiative, Mr. Ban said the future of Mr. Assad should not be allowed
to hold up efforts to end the war…” Oh, that sounds familiar. Just a
coincidence that NYT would use the same VOA spin to de-emphasize the
fact that it is only the NATO and evil Gulf cronies that are insisting
on Assad’s departure and holding up efforts to end the war. The message
NYT is delivering on behalf of Moon is that the war should end, and
never mind what the U.S. want’s to do with Assad.
Times of Israel is next, but it’s also an irritating-as-hell ‘search results’ page. The first article listed is US troops in Syria will only fight Islamic State — Kerry but you need go no further than the subtitle “UN chief says Vienna talks to end country’s civil war should not be held up over Bashar Assad’s future”.
Glad to see that the Times of Israel also falls into line, ignoring
Moon’s comment about the will of the Syrian people and instead, points
out how trivial the people’s will is — it just shouldn’t matter! Let’s
give ToI another shot. The next article is UN chief urges ‘flexibility’ at multilateral Syria talks but once again, no need to go further than the subtitle “Ban Ki-moon welcomes Iran’s participation in negotiations, says there is ‘no military solution’ to civil war”.
Again, no reason to trouble the Syrian people or kick fake ISIS/fake al
Nusra/fake FSA’s ass in Syria. The solution should be ‘negotiated’ (as
if…).
See the trend here?
By the third page of Google results,
Forbes shows up. After their usesess Quote of the Day and ad countdown
timer, we get to an article about Moon being on their list of the most
powerful people. Thanks for nothin’, Forbes. Later…
ABC News is next. Surprise — f—king
‘search results’ page generated by ABC News for topic ‘united nations’.
You know what, Google and Western MSM? F—k you all. Half way down the
results, we get Ban: Talks on Syria Shouldn’t Be Held up Over Assad’s Future.
Which is reiterated twice more in the massive, eight-sentence long
article. Nothing about the Syrian people deciding — the message is “just
don’t talk about Assad” (so we can kill him).
No point in going on. The narrative seems
to be that mere consideration of the will of the Syrian people would
impede a negotiated settlement to their ongoing slaughter
<sigh…>.
——
Like the earlier round on this story, the
present news report is going out to virtually all of the Western
national news-media, including but not limited to: New York Times,
Washington Post, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Nation, National Review,
New Yorker, The New Republic, Common Dreams, Alternet, Huffington Post,
Salon, Slate, Truthout, ABC News, CBS News, ABC News, CNN, MSNBC,
Foreign Policy magazine, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph,
the Daily Mail, the National Post, Der Spiegel, etc.
And, yet again, you’ll be able to see how
many of them report it: Just google (with the quotation-marks, of
course): “Twice in One Day, Ban Ki-Moon Condemned Obama’s Actions on
Syria” and you will see just how ‘free’ ‘our’ ‘news’ media actually are.
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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