War and Empire Links: July 2018

The Ubiquity of Evil. Craig Murray. July 30, 2018.

What had struck me most forcibly was the sheer scale of the Holocaust operation, the tens of thousands of people who had been complicit in administering it. I could never understand how that could happen – until I saw ordinary, decent people in the FCO facilitate extraordinary rendition and torture. Then I understood, for the first time, the banality of evil or, perhaps more precisely, the ubiquity of evil.

Behind the secret U.S. war in Africa. Wesley Morgan, Politico. July 2, 2018.

Despite Pentagon assertions, secret programs allow American troops to direct combat raids in Somalia, Kenya, Niger and other African nations.

Why We Know So Little About the U.S.-Backed War in Yemen. Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. July 27, 2018.

What the U.N. calls the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” is an unhappy confluence of American media taboos.

Yemen is a catastrophe on a scale similar to Syria, but coverage in the United States has been sporadic at best. PBS News Hour did a thorough three-part series, but MSNBC, for instance, has barely mentioned the crisis in a year, during a period when it has done 455 segments on Stormy Daniels (this according to media reporter Adam Johnson). 

The reason for inattention is obvious: The United States bears real responsibility for the crisis. A quote from a Yemeni doctor found in PBS reporter Jane Ferguson’s piece sums it up: 

“The missiles that kill us, American-made. The planes that kill us, American-made. The tanks … American-made. You are saying to me, where is America? America is the whole thing.”

... 

Yemen is a classic example of what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman described as the “worthy and unworthy victims” problem in their iconic examination of American media, “Manufacturing Consent.” The obvious-sounding theory holds that violence committed by Americans or by their client states will be covered a lot less than identical acts committed by adversary states. 

So a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a “worthy” victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests and nuns around the same time was a less “worthy” story. 

Yemen features the wrong kinds of victims, lacks a useful partisan angle and, frankly, is nobody’s idea of clickbait in the Trump age. Until it becomes a political football for some influential person or party, this disaster will probably stay near the back of the line.

Yemen's children are starving. Youtube.com.