Editor's note: if you're wondering where I've been the past couple of weeks, you can find an update here. Please also note that this blog post is part of the "Leftist Theory" and the "New Old Forever War" collections on ninaillingworth.com.
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media." - Noam Chomsky
Imperial Fantasies with Deadly Consequences
Over the past five or so years of writing, I've spent a lot of time studying the Chomsky-Herman "Propaganda Model" as well as the historical (and quite deliberate) role of for-profit media in disseminating, and reinforcing reactionary, ruling class, or state propaganda in the public discourse. Unfortunately, these discussions about mainstream Pig Empire propaganda can often trend towards the abstract or conceptual, which is why I've also tried to explore concrete, or everyday examples of this propaganda machine in action wherever possible.
One specific such example might be American propaganda operation surrounding the 2019 (and still ongoing at the time) fundie fascist coup in Bolivia that my co-host Nick Galea and I broke down as part of a March 2020 episode of The No Fugazi Podcast. Of course, that story eventually took a happier turn, at least for the moment; after a year of violent, reactionary tyranny under a U.S. backed post-coup dictatorship lead by Jeanine Áñez, and despite numerous pro-Western attempts to interfere with another election in the country, the people of Bolivia reasserted their control over their own destiny democratically and once again elected a Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) Party candidate, Luis Arce. Unsurprisingly, this newly-elected Bolivian government subsequently undertook efforts to investigate, charge, and detain Áñez for her role in the violent, anti-democratic coup to oust then-rightfully elected MAS president Evo Morales; as all victims of a violent fascist coup attempt would be advised to do with self-appointed dictators - whether that coup is temporarily successful or not.
So all's well that ends well, right? Not so fast sparky; the Pig Empire doesn't exactly have a long history of tolerating left-leaning Latin American countries exerting their sovereignty against the wishes of American capital. Recent rumblings out of the always-loyal Western corporate media strongly suggest that the United States isn't finished with MAS and Bolivia's natural resources yet; and Uncle Sam isn't known to let petty details like elections and investigative reporting get in the way of attempts to manufacture consent for imperial aggression against anyone who might oppose American efforts to loot their country for corporate profits.
Let's get deep into the weeds here for a moment, shall we?
(False) Narratives of Convenience
Continuing in the tradition of combining the theoretical study of propaganda with practical examples of a propaganda system in action, today I'd like to return to a few concepts I originally discussed in a December 2018 essay called "Lying Without Lying: the Manipulation of Framing, Context & Depth in Corporate Media" and examine how they pertain to a highly revealing Opinion item shared by the Washington Post Editorial Board on March 18th, 2021. In particular, I'd like to look at a current example of the ways western corporate media uses the repetition of false narratives and techniques like lying, misrepresenting, and omitting key facts, to manufacture consent for imperialist foreign policy across the larger Pig Empire - and as you might have guessed; to really see how the sausage is made, we're going to return to the topic of American interference in Bolivia.
Alright then, let's start by ignoring Jeff Bezos' annoying and self-defeating paywall, to look at WaPo's effectively anonymous little blog post in all of its five hundred word glory:
"Opinion: The Bolivian government is on a lawless course. Its democracy must be preserved.
Opinion
by Editorial
Board
March
18, 2021 at 3:58 p.m. EDT
ONLY
A FEW months ago, the Andean nation of Bolivia seemed to be on its
way to healing, after a year that had thrown its political future
into jeopardy. Luis
Arce,
a candidate of the country’s socialist party, had won the Oct. 18
presidential elections. His opponents — Carlos Mesa, who ran
against him on a centrist platform, and the conservative then-interim
president, Jeanine Áñez — had accepted the result. And Mr. Arce
had pledged to govern on the basis of unity and conciliation. Thus
did Bolivia appear to exit a crisis that the leader of Mr. Arce’s
party, former president Evo Morales, precipitated by attempting to
steal a fourth term through election fraud in 2019, leading to
often-violent demonstrations, the military’s abandonment of the
Morales-led government — and Mr. Morales’s departure to exile.
Now,
unfortunately, Mr. Arce appears to have reverted to a more one-sided
and vengeful leadership style characteristic of Mr. Morales, who has
returned to Bolivia and still wields considerable power. On March 13,
the government jailed
Ms. Áñez and
two former members of her cabinet, threatening them with prosecution
and long prison terms; warrants are out for several other former top
officials. These actions follow an
amnesty for
Mr. Morales’s supporters accused of human rights violations
while Ms. Áñez was in power, as well as the institution of
de facto political loyalty tests for
key government employees.
Mr.
Arce’s government claims that
it is merely enforcing laws against sedition that Ms. Áñez
purportedly broke by fomenting a “coup” against Mr. Morales. Ms.
Áñez is certainly not blameless in Bolivia’s problems, having
governed high-handedly, including by trying, shortly after she took
office, to shield security forces from punishment for sometimes
deadly violence against pro-Morales protesters.
Yet
Ms. Áñez, facing pressure from human rights advocates, withdrew
that decree; and the accusation at the core of her arrest now —
that she plotted with the Bolivian military and others to overthrow
Mr. Morales — is at odds with historical reality. Mr. Morales lost
power because of his own attempt to subvert the 2019 election —
which Organization of American States (OAS) observers confirmed at
the time — and the Bolivian people’s massive rejection of it in
the streets. Ms. Áñez succeeded to the presidency under a tenuous
but constitutionally prescribed emergency process; and, to her
credit, she peacefully ceded power to Mr. Arce when he won last year.
Tens
of thousands of Bolivians have taken to the streets in opposition to
what Mr. Arce is now doing. Bolivia’s Catholic bishops
have issued a statement against
what they called an attempt to turn the justice system into a
partisan weapon and to “create a false account of history,
inventing the truth and manipulating the conscience of
Bolivians.” The
OAS secretariat also
decried the arrest of Ms. Áñez, prompting Mr. Arce’s minister
of justice to threaten OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro with
prosecution.
The
Bolivian government’s lawless course threatens further chaos, if
not civil war and outright dictatorship, at a time when the country,
among the hardest hit by covid-19 in
the world, should be fighting the pandemic. The Biden administration
should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in
this long-suffering country, lest crisis turn into catastrophe."
Okay so before we get to a sort of line by line refutation of what's going on here, let me start by noting that the above WaPo piece is by no means a legitimate news item, but it's certainly an impressive piece of Pig Empire propaganda; even if only for its crass dishonesty and cynical assumptions about the reading public in general. Given the outrageous omissions, misrepresentations, and outright lies covered in this concise little smear job, it's really not a surprise the always pro-empire Washington Post is hiding behind both its editorial board byline, and the "Opinion" tag here either. Despite this however - words do actually mean things, and when you state falsehoods as facts, it's got absolutely nothing to do with subjective analysis or a right to express unpopular ideas.
So what exactly do I mean by falsehoods? Well for starters, Bolivia didn't experience a generic political "crisis," it was a U.S. backed right wing fundamentalist coup. Additionally, then-rightfully elected Bolivian President Evo Morales didn't precipitate the coup, a phony report by the Organization of American States (OAS) built around disingenuous math games did; and furthermore, the OAS analysis was so thoroughly and publicly refuted, even in the Washington Post itself, that claiming Morales is guilty of attempted election fraud (an accusation repeated twice in this 531 word article) at this late a date, borders on Orwellian. In common parlance, we call printing things like this "lying."
Turning our attention towards WaPo's mere misrepresentations doesn't really improve the picture either. Bolivian military officials didn't just "abandon" the elected government; they actively pressured President Morales to step down, and he didn't "depart to exile" so much as flee for his life in the face of right wing violence and terrorism targeting his home, members of his party, and his supporters. Furthermore, Jeanine Áñez didn't succeed to the Presidency "under a tenuous but constitutionally prescribed emergency process;" she appointed herself interim president in front of a rump Congress that lacked quorum, with the backing of the military in a coup d’état that was anything but constitutional - as noted by award-winning journalist and author Stephen Kinzer during a December 2019 forum organized by Mass. Peace Action and other groups at the Community Church of Boston:
“William Kaliman, former Commander in Chief of the Bolivian armed forces, forced President Evo Morales to resign,” Kinzer noted. “A week later he moved to the United States.”
“Evo’s term runs through January 2020. Even if you don’t accept the election of October 20th, Morales’ term as president that he won five years ago should still be ongoing. The succession laws that are supposed to be followed after a president resigns were completely flouted. Several members of the MAS were passed over and power was passed unconstitutionally to Añez.”
Please keep in mind that this is not a matter of opinion or interpretation; there's photographic evidence this was an unconstitutional military coup:
Let's stick with misrepresentation for a moment here. While I'm forced to admit that the WaPo editorial board is welcome to its opinion that Áñez deserves "credit" for "peacefully ceding" an election she'd already dropped out of after running a distant fourth in the polls; given the fact that she barred the rightfully elected President Evo Morales from running again, and delayed the new election three times to help the real far right candidate (more on him below,) no reasonable person is obliged to agree with them. Equally absurd are the suggestions that Ms. Áñez's reign of violent, even murderous terror over Bolivian socialists can be dismissed as "having governed high-handedly," or that the reactionary, unlawful government she presided over are mere run-of-the-mill "conservatives." Of course, these unsupportable opinions might also explain why the new Bolivian government's charges of terrorism against Áñez never even made it into the story at all.
All of which then leaves us with the WaPo editorial board's lies by omission; of which there are many. Since I assume you're starting to get a sense of just how full of crap this piece is already, I'll wrap this portion of our examination up by discussing only the three most glaring and dishonest omissions in this article.
"No
mainstream outlet warned its readers that the OAS is a Cold War
organization, explicitly set up to halt the spread of leftist
governments. In 1962, for example, it passed
an official resolution claiming
that the Cuban government was “incompatible with the principles and
objectives of the inter-American system.” Furthermore, the
organization is bankrolled by the US government; indeed, in
justifying its continued funding, US AID argued that
the OAS is a crucial tool in “promot[ing] US interests in the
Western hemisphere by countering the influence of anti-US countries”
like Bolivia."
Additionally; citing a statement by the Bolivian Bishops’ Conference to protect a blood-soaked dictator installed via a US-backed military coup, without revealing that same body previously supported the coup, or discussing the Bolivian Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to Morales' socialist, and pro-Indigenous land return policies, is also obviously dishonest. This is to say nothing of quietly concealing the ultra-conservative Catholicism and disdain for Bolivian Indigenous people Áñez herself shares with the Bishops - as explained in these articles by The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Jacobin Magazine respectively:
"The
coup regime is now led by Jeanine Áñez, a Christian-fundamentalist
senator and opponent of Morales, who in 2013 tweeted (translation):
“I dream of a Bolivia free of indigenous satanic rites, the city is
not for ‘Indians,’ they better go to the highlands or El Chaco.”
On claiming the presidency after the army “asked” Morales to step
down (he fled to Mexico following threats to his life and has since
moved to Argentina), Áñez declared, “Thank God the Bible has
returned to the Bolivian government.” About two-thirds of Bolivia’s
population is Indigenous, forming a major part of Morales’s support
base. Before the coup, MAS held majorities in both the Bolivian
chamber of deputies and the senate."
"An
ultraconservative Catholic senator, Áñez hails from the thinly
populated Amazonian department of Beni, a region whose indigenous
peoples first made the demand for a constituent assembly in the
1990s. But Áñez is no ally of indigenous Bolivians. She believes
indigenous spirituality to be a sign of Satan, and upon seizing power
in the days after November 10, she declared the national government
to be “at last” free of paganism. Her partisans trampled upon and
burned the Wiphala — the banner of indigenous unity — prompting
tens of thousands of indigenous people to pour into the streets in
protest."
Finally; I must admit that I'm not quite sure how to classify writing a quasi-anonymous editorial about the political fallout from a right wing coup in Bolivia without once mentioning the name of admitted coup plotter and noted Bolivian fascist, Luis Fernando Camacho. Given however that the facts surrounding Camacho's political involvement with both the uprising and the Áñez regime speak directly to the reality that it was an organized, anti-democratic, illegal fascist coup, it seems like the WaPo editors really should have found a place to work at least a few lines about a key player like Camacho in there; even if only as a matter of journalistic integrity.
Please also note that while I chose to focus on this Washington Post editorial board post because of its artless execution and owner Jeff Bezos' business ties to the American imperial state, they are by no means alone in the Pig Empire establishment's efforts to undermine the socialist government of Bolivia. Indeed, as relentlessly documented by the folks at FAIR, you can find equally disingenuous articles clearly designed to distort public opinions about Bolivian politics in outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, the Associated Press, and many others; articles published both during, and long after the unlawful 2019 right wing coup in Bolivia. If one were feeling a little conspiratorial, you might even be inclined to suggest that the almost unbroken ideological conformity of the Pig Empire media's coverage of events in Bolivia, was in and of itself, clear evidence of the Propaganda Model at work.
Drawing the Strings Together
Okay, so we've successfully demonstrated that western corporate media outlets as a whole are more than happy to repeat false narratives about our "enemies" in Bolivia, even when those narratives have already been debunked in their own publications. Furthermore, I think we've conclusively proven that the editorial board at the Washington Post in particular has an almost preternatural ability to pack a staggering amount of festering bullcrap into a few paragraphs of authoritatively-worded pearl clutching. Finally, we can say with certainty that it's hardly a secret that reactionary Pig Empire billionaires, the Trump Administration, and our western allies, all supported the original right wing coup in Bolivia and the pack of lies that sold it, quite enthusiastically.
What however does all of this really mean? Well, if you throw in the reality that the WaPo editorial board explicitly called on the Biden administration to interfere in Bolivian politics to protect Áñez, and that U.S. state-controlled outlet Voice of America echoed the same false narrative about her arrest as the private sector media did, what we're looking at here is the reasonably strong outline of a Pig Empire propaganda operation to manufacture consent for imperialist policy in action. All we're really missing to expose how the magic happens is the kind of "smoking gun" connection to a sitting American official that not even Biden's failson minions over at State would be dumb enough to give us; right?
Oh you poor, sweet, summer child - I feel like I'm telling an orphan there's no Santa Claus:
Well damn Tony; given the Biden administration's rhetoric about cleansing the legacy of Trump's foreign policy, that's pretty awkward, ain't it my dude? So much for build back better, I guess.
And still, the beat goes marching on...
- nina illingworth
