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FAIR
View article on FAIR's website ([link removed])
Media Project Trump Crimes Onto Empire’s Enemies Lucas Koerner ([link removed])


CNN: Trump is reading out of the Middle East autocrats' playbook

CNN (6/7/20 ([link removed]) ) presents US repression as a foreign import.

US President Donald Trump threatened on June 1 to send active duty troops to crush the anti-racist rebellion sweeping the country in the wake of George Floyd’s police murder. The announcement was followed by a photo op in front of St. John’s Church in DC’s Lafayette Square, which was brutally cleared of demonstrators by military police.

The reaction from corporate media was to chastise Trump’s move as “un-American” (CNN, 6/3/20 ([link removed]) ), obscuring the domestic sources of inspiration for his vicious crackdown.


** Putin, Xi, Chávez, Oh My!
------------------------------------------------------------

A cascade of op-eds likened Trump and his militarized attempted power grab to Washington’s official bogeymen. Foreign Policy (6/2/20 ([link removed]) ) compared the president to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, while CNN (6/7/20 ([link removed]) ) declared that Trump is “reading out of the Middle East autocrats’ playbook.”

“Mr Trump is infatuated with military and politicalstrongmen ([link removed] Stories&pgtype=Homepage) . He sides with authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte,” decried the Guardian’s editorial board (6/4/20 ([link removed]) ), linking to a New York Times column (6/4/20 ([link removed]) ) that lambasted the US leader for “follow[ing] a strongman’s playbook.”
WaPo: Trump is taking U.S. democracy to the breaking point. I saw what happens next in Venezuela.

A Washington Post column (6/3/20 ([link removed]) ) compares the US government's attack on democracy at home to the response to the US government's attack of democracy in Venezuela.

The Washington Post (6/3/20 ([link removed]) ) rolled out Western media’s favorite analogy (FAIR.org, 5/7/20 ([link removed]) ), likening the US president who just threatened a coup d’etat to the literal victim of a Washington-sponsored coup: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Post columnist Francisco Toro ([link removed]) accused Venezuela’s popular elected leader of having “broke[n] the back of Venezuelan democracy” by activating a plan ([link removed]) to deploy active duty military to the streets.

The Venezuelan emigre blogger falsely claimed that the “army stumbled into staging a coup, but not one anyone had calculated ahead of time,” suppressing the extensive evidence ([link removed]) that military brass and business elites had planned Chávez’s overthrow weeks, if not months, in advance, with full US knowledge.

Similarly, Edward Asner penned an op-ed for the Daily Beast (6/10/20 ([link removed]) ) headlined, “Trump’s Anti-Protest Authoritarianism Has Echoes of Venezuela.” The famed actor equated white supremacist pro-Trump militas with black and brown people in Venezuela’s barrios organizing community self-defense groups, or colectivos ([link removed]) , long vilified ([link removed]) by opposition elites and the Western media to justify anti-Chavista violence ([link removed]) and murderous US economic sanctions ([link removed]) (e.g., Voice of America, 4/10/19 ([link removed]) ; Washington Post, 8/14/19
([link removed]) ).


** The Cult of US Exceptionalism
------------------------------------------------------------

Other pundits compared the repression in Lafayette Square to that seen during China’s 1989 Tiananmen protests. Washington Post reporter Adam Taylor (6/4/20 ([link removed]) ) complained that by savagely escalating the clampdown on the eve of the 31st Tiananmen anniversary, Trump had “surrender[ed] soft power” and done more to distract from the commemoration “than Beijing’s censors ever could.” Taylor also scolded Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton for failing to mention the anniversary in his now notorious New York Times op-ed (6/3/20 ([link removed]) ) cheerleading Trump’s crackdown, though the Post journalist did not otherwise criticize the op-ed’s argument.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (6/3/20 ([link removed]) ) similarly appropriated Tiananmen to question Trump’s “manhood,” while safely cordoning off the US empire and its military from critique:

No, United States troops won’t massacre protesters, as Chinese troops did, but Trump’s deployment of troops for political purposes would betray our traditions, damage the credibility of the armed forces and exacerbate tensions across the country.

He apparently did not appreciate the irony of fretting over the “credibility” of a genocidal institution literally responsible for killing millions of people across dozens of countries, including Yemen ([link removed]) , Iraq ([link removed]) , Syria ([link removed]) , Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos ([link removed]) , Korea ([link removed]) , Haiti ([link removed]) , Philippines ([link removed]) and North America
([link removed]) —and indirectly involved in arming and training client regimes guilty of murdering millions more ([link removed]) .

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin (6/4/20 ([link removed]) ) doubled down on Kristof’s Orientalism, claiming that US military brass’ reticence to enter politics “is what separates us from China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt and others, and the way their autocrats use the military to put civilians down.”

Rubin and other commentators' outrage at Trump’s “fetish” for military violence (New Republic, 5/29/20 ([link removed]) ; Washington Post, 6/3/20 ([link removed]) ; Guardian, 6/7/20 ([link removed]) ) concealed their own idolatry of US exceptionalism.


** Imperial Crocodile Tears
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Guardian: The day police bombed a city street: can scars of 1985 MOVE atrocity be healed?

When an example is needed from the 1980s of government using massive deadly force to crush dissent (Guardian, 5/10/20 ([link removed]) ), shouldn't Americans think first of an incident from Philadelphia rather than Beijing?

As Louis Allday observed ([link removed]) , the Trump administration’s threat to target the imperial death machine on the domestic “battle space” is hardly unprecedented, having been brought to bear by previous US rulers now normalized by the corporate media (FAIR.org, 9/19/17 ([link removed]) , 3/7/17 ([link removed]) ).

From the white supremacist ([link removed]) and anti-labor ([link removed]) massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the FBI’s COINTELPRO ([link removed]) of the 1960s and ’70s, to the bombing ([link removed]) of the MOVE black liberation organization in Philadelphia in 1985 that leveled 61 houses, the US state and its proxies have not hesitated to employ terrorism ([link removed]) against the population.

The US national security state’s unfulfilled intentions are even more terrifying. In 1950, the FBI drew up plans ([link removed]) for the “permanent detention” of 12,000 US citizens accused of subversion in Guantánamo-style military prisons, while Congress passed a bill ([link removed]*mccarran security act detention camps&source=bl&ots=zCJnL7kJwp&sig=ACfU3U0_mFipSu8h0txPtIoFzxA-2SJhwg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjayI6ZworqAhUPILkGHaH7BBk4ChDoATAAegQIChAB#v=onepage&q=*mccarran security act detention camps&f=false) authorizing the construction of concentration camps for dissidents, six of which were in fact built. In the 1960s, the Pentagon prepared ([link removed]) to wage counter-insurgency warfare in 25 US cities if the popular uprisings against white supremacy and imperial militarism overcame
the brutal state crackdown ([link removed]) and continued to escalate.

In the 1980s, the Miami Herald (7/5/87 ([link removed]) ) reported, the Federal Emergency Management Agency drew up, under the direction of the National Security Council’s Oliver North,

a secret contingency plan that called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.

Business Insider: Iran and China are using the George Floyd protests to undermine US criticism of their own authoritarianism

It doesn't seem to occur to Business Insider (6/2/20 ([link removed]) ) that the US government uses countries like Iran and China to undermine criticism of its own authoritarianism.

Refusing to reckon with these horrors, Western journalists from across the political spectrum accused Trump of tarnishing Washington’s image as “the world's moral guardian” (CNN, 6/6/20 ([link removed]) ) and allowing official enemies to “us[e] the protests…to undermine the US's criticism of their own authoritarianism” (Business Insider, 6/2/20 ([link removed]) ; also Politico, 6/1/20 ([link removed]) ; NBC, 6/3/20 ([link removed]) ; BBC, 6/5/20 ([link removed]) ; ABC News, 6/6/20 ([link removed]) ;
Newsweek, 6/8/20 ([link removed]) ; Washington Post, 6/8/20 ([link removed]) ).

Senior military brass likewise raised the alarm that Trump was not only delegitimizing the domestic “forces of order” but also, as Brookings Institution president and former four-star Marine Gen. John Allen warned, “wreck[ing] the high regard Americans have for their military” (Foreign Policy, 6/3/20 ([link removed]) ), which should only be mobilized to crush internal dissent as a last resort.

Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen (Atlantic, 6/2/20 ([link removed]) ) touted the “compassion” of the US military, which he said must never treat “fellow citizens” as an “enemy.” The admiral, who helped direct ([link removed]) Obama’s drone terrorism program ([link removed]) responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings around the world, including US citizens ([link removed]) , urged us not to “lose sight…of institutional racism.”

But behind their pandering, elite pundits and anti-Trump war criminals’ main concern is not the president’s coup-mongering per se, but the danger that his thuggish repression will further discredit the US empire, especially its police, military and media (FAIR.org, 6/4/20 ([link removed]) , 6/7/20 ([link removed]) , 6/9/20 ([link removed]) ).

They justifiably fear that, emboldened by Trump’s naked criminality, the growing mass movement against white supremacy will radicalize into a full-scale rejection of the system as a whole, which no amount of kente-clad kneeling ([link removed]) can appease.


Read more ([link removed])

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