Media Project Trump Crimes Onto Empire’s Enemies
Lucas Koerner
 CNN (6/7/20) 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), 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) compared the president to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, while CNN (6/7/20) declared that Trump is “reading out of the Middle East autocrats’ playbook.”
“Mr Trump is infatuated with military and political strongmen. He sides with authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Rodrigo Duterte,” decried the Guardian’s editorial board (6/4/20), linking to a New York Times column (6/4/20) that lambasted the US leader for “follow[ing] a strongman’s playbook.”
 A Washington Post column (6/3/20) 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) rolled out Western media’s favorite analogy (FAIR.org, 5/7/20), 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 accused Venezuela’s popular elected leader of having “broke[n] the back of Venezuelan democracy” by activating a plan 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 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) 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, long vilified by opposition elites and the Western media to justify anti-Chavista violence and murderous US economic sanctions (e.g., Voice of America, 4/10/19; Washington Post, 8/14/19).
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) 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) cheerleading Trump’s crackdown, though the Post journalist did not otherwise criticize the op-ed’s argument.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (6/3/20) 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, Iraq, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Korea, Haiti, Philippines and North America—and indirectly involved in arming and training client regimes guilty of murdering millions more.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin (6/4/20) 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; Washington Post, 6/3/20; Guardian, 6/7/20) concealed their own idolatry of US exceptionalism.
Imperial Crocodile Tears
 When an example is needed from the 1980s of government using massive deadly force to crush dissent (Guardian, 5/10/20), shouldn't Americans think first of an incident from Philadelphia rather than Beijing?
As Louis Allday observed, 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, 3/7/17).
From the white supremacist and anti-labor massacres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the FBI’s COINTELPRO of the 1960s and ’70s, to the bombing 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 against the population.
The US national security state’s unfulfilled intentions are even more terrifying. In 1950, the FBI drew up plans for the “permanent detention” of 12,000 US citizens accused of subversion in Guantánamo-style military prisons, while Congress passed a bill authorizing the construction of concentration camps for dissidents, six of which were in fact built. In the 1960s, the Pentagon prepared to wage counter-insurgency warfare in 25 US cities if the popular uprisings against white supremacy and imperial militarism overcame the brutal state crackdown and continued to escalate.
In the 1980s, the Miami Herald (7/5/87) 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.
 It doesn't seem to occur to Business Insider (6/2/20) 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) and allowing official enemies to “us[e] the protests…to undermine the US's criticism of their own authoritarianism” (Business Insider, 6/2/20; also Politico, 6/1/20; NBC, 6/3/20; BBC, 6/5/20; ABC News, 6/6/20; Newsweek, 6/8/20; Washington Post, 6/8/20).
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), 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) touted the “compassion” of the US military, which he said must never treat “fellow citizens” as an “enemy.” The admiral, who helped direct Obama’s drone terrorism program responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings around the world, including US citizens, 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, 6/7/20, 6/9/20).
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 can appease.
|
