Nick Cohen wants us to forget the west uses chemical weapons
Yesterday in the Guardian Nick Cohen could be found using his talents to shill for more lovely humanitarian war.
Nothing odd about that. The MSM almost always shills for war nowadays, and very few of its star columnists have a problem with writing queasy equivocations or faux moral outrage pieces in support of “western intervention.” It apparently doesn’t trouble their consciences at all. Nor do they feel in any way responsible for the subsequent mass slaughter of innocents that usually follows swiftly on. Maybe they are so deluded they really believe western air forces drop nothing but blankets for children. Who knows, or even much cares what their phoney rationales might be. Cohen’s piece is largely just another one of these “won’t someone please do the right thing and murder more brown people,” hack pieces, but there’s a couple of things we should probably draw attention to. Namely:
On the one side was Bashar al-Assad, chief capo in a hereditary tyranny. He joined Saddam Hussein in becoming one of only two leaders to have used chemical weapons against civilians since the end of the Second World War.
Firstly, this article ignores the fact there is still absolutely no confirmed evidence Assad even has any chemical weapons left. Nor any confirmed evidence he ever used such weapons. Like the Russian invasion of Ukraine these pseudo-truths exist merely as assertions in the media, ‘verified’ by non-interrogation, rather than by supporting data.
But it’s the second assertion that really should get some kind of award for “most breathtaking use of a total falsehood in pursuit of state-sponsored murder”.
“…He joined Saddam Hussein in becoming one of only two leaders to have used chemical weapons against civilians since the end of the Second World War….”
What? Is Cohen saying Agent Orange wasn’t used against civilians by the US in Vietnam? White phosphorus (defined by the US Defense Dept as a ‘chemical weapon‘ since the first Gulf War) wasn’t used against civilians by the US in Fallujah? Or by Israel in Gaza?
If Cohen really doesn’t know about any of this then he’s not qualified to write in a paper of record. If he does know about all of this – then why is he pretending it didn’t happen? And why is the Guardian prepared to put its reputation behind letting him do it?
The hubris is incredible. How in the age of Google can these people continue to think their masterly word is going to be enough to make us all forget the inconvenient truths? Or is the frantic “Germans bayoneted Belgian babies” style of propaganda just more evidence that they know their latest bid to get us all to back war in Syria is another failure?
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And, the “he gasses his own people” (echoing GWB talking about Saddam), got applied to Assad well AFTER we attacked Syria. Obama joined Erdogan in saying “Assad must go” in March 2011. This was the time of the trademarked Arab Spring demonstrations. I can’t find it on the internets now, but at one of the early spontaneous demonstrations, I think 9 soldiers or police were killed by snipers. Predictably, the response by the state turned violent. There was no coverage of this, but instead the “news” started hyping the Syrian Observatory, aka some guy in London. So how did it become Obama’s legal right to overthrow Assad in the first place?
the peaceful unarmed protesters always seem to have guns,
Excellent response to the deranged ramblings of Nick Cohen – I thought the line about “pseudo-truths exist merely as assertions in the media, ‘verified’ by non-interrogation, rather than by supporting data”. was completely spot on.
You’re right, there is no actual evidence that the Syrian government carried out any chemical weapons attacks at all and plenty of supporting evidence that they were synthetic events, executed by western state-sponsored actors and Saudi and Turkish intelligence agents and assets.
http://web.mit.edu/sts/Analysis%20of%20the%20UN%20Report%20on%20Syria%20CW.pdf
Of course, these pseudo-truths are backed up with psuedo-objective reports like the Ghouta page on Wiki, which at first glance seems unbiased, but reveals itself as deeply supportive of the ‘Assad did it’ narrative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghouta_chemical_attack
For anyone interested, compare and contrast the above with Mother Agnes Mariam de la Croix’s ISTEAMS report:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ghouta-chemical-attacks-us-backed-false-flag-killing-children-to-justify-a-humanitarian-military-intervention/5351363
Likewise, the flurry of reports that ISIS have been manufacturing and carrying out attacks on the Kurds using chemical weapons, completely destroys the western argument that it had to be the Syrian state behind the Ghouta and other attacks, because the so-called ‘rebels’ did not have the technological and logistical ability to manufacture chemical weapons.
The other thing that really irks me about Cohen’s hit piece is his casual use of pejorative language, namely calling Assad, a “chief capo in a hereditary tyranny” – You would not know from this that various polls in recent years have show a 70% plus approval rate for him – if his government was really so tyrannical, then where is the phantom army of ‘moderate Syrian rebels’ to overthrow him, Nick?
Given that conditions for a coup since 2011 would be perfect in such a war-ravaged land, the fact that the US could only find less than 60 actual ‘moderate rebels’ to train at any given time and form into a fighting unit, (a unit that despite overwhelming US military air-cover managed to fall apart on their first ‘mission’,) tells me that the multi-faith population of Syria overwhelming backs the Assad government, hardly a picture of a tyrannical ‘chief capo’.
Nick Cohen’s complete lack of historical accuracy (Johnson and Nixon’s sanctioning of large scale chemical attacks on the civilian population of North Vietnam as the article points out) is sadly to be expected, and on one level is an incredible skill: how do these Guardian ‘journalists’ manage to keep facts from creeping into their work so consistently?
On a more general level, this short article raises a point that I think should be central to any critique of these pro-NATO apologists – how do these people engage and maintain such cognitive dissonance between the words they write in support of the many western-led ‘humanitarian interventions’ and the consequences of that support – countries like Libya and Iraq absolutely decimated, entire populations traumatised, millions of men, women and children dead, maimed or displaced as unwelcome migrants by the very countries that have caused them to flee.
The fact that Nick Cohen wants the very same disaster that was visited on Libya and Iraq to happen to the people of Syria suggests to me that beyond having no conscience, he has no humanity left inside of him – he reminds me of one of those WWII SS officers who could lovingly play with their own children but had no problem with putting a bullet in the head of someone else’s child.
He thinks “chemical weapon” only means poisonous gas.
There’s also depleted uranium, a toxic and radioactive metal widely used in US munitions.
It’s used in ammunition fired by the tank busting A10 aircraft, the Abrams tank and the Bradley troop carrier.
It’s also used in cruise missiles and even civilian aircraft as balance weights.
The US Navy and the Russian Army have long since abandoned its use due to environmental and health concerns.
One could also call the Bushes a hereditary tyranny, and if Jeb and Hillary get the nominations, the next US president as a fraternal or marital tyranny.