This week on CounterSpin: We heard a cable TV commentator say recently that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia's Vladimir Putin is trying to "put an end to democracy as we know it." We know we wasn't the only ones wondering, among other things, what "we" is being invoked here? And what's the definition of the "democracy" we're meant to be endorsing? Does it account for, say, the people who broke into the US Capitol last January trying to violently overturn a presidential election, and their supporters, explicit and implicit?
Thing is: Corporate news media don't define the "democracy" they invoke as shorthand justification for pretty much anything, including war. It's a murky stand-in for "a good place, where people have a voice and…stuff." Even when and where it demonstrably means anything but.
With the ongoing horrific attack on Ukraine by Russia, you get the sense that war is a clarifier—proof that "Russia" as a country deserves pariah status, with all that entails (and media have a big box of what that entails).
And as Americans, media suggest, we're meant to see and celebrate and fight for our difference from an imperialist, racist nation.
So it is, respectfully, a good time to recall that we had a war within this country, in which many people declared that they cared less about this country than about white supremacy. And that sentiment did not disappear. And those conversations have not finished. And ignoring them doesn't erase them.
Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and, most recently, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
We talked with her in November of last year about the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. We revisit that conversation this week.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the "no-fly zone" proposal.
