From Venezuela to McCain, Big Media and Human Rights Industry in Lockstep
Sen, John McCain. {Carolyn Kaster / AP)
On August 20, the Economist ran an article on Venezuela saying that "forced
migration from the country might surpass the Syria crisis." The magazine
reported:
"
The UN's International Organization for Migration estimates that at the end
of 2017 approximately 1.6 million Venezuelans were living outside their
country. Today that number is likely to be far higher: as of June 2018 there
were nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia alone. The UNHCR, the
UN's refugee agency, has recorded 135,000 asylum applications from
Venezuelans during the first seven months of 2018, already 20 percent more
than for the whole of 2017. The total number of displaced Venezuelans may
already have reached 4 million, out of a population of some 30 million. The
outflow could eventually surpass the 6 million people who have fled the
Syrian civil war.
The UN's International Organization for Migration estimates that, by July of
2018, 2.3 million Venezuelans were living abroad (which includes hundreds of
thousands who have spent decades abroad). Why does the Economist say it
"may already" be 4 million? A good guess is that they are relying on the
estimates of Tomas Paez, a vehemently anti-government Venezuelan academic
who has long been a favorite source for corporate journalists (FAIR.org,
2/18/18). Paez has estimated that 1.6 million people left Venezuela from
1999-2015, about five times more than UN Population Division estimates for
that period.
Economist: The exodus from Venezuela threatens to descend into chaos
The Economist's claim (8/20/18) that migration from Venezuela "might surpass
the Syrian crisis" is off by a factor of seven.
No doubt as Venezuela's economy entered what could fairly be called a
"collapse" starting in 2015, migration began to skyrocket, and it is indeed
likely to get worse, thanks to illegal economic sanctions that Trump enacted
in August 2017.
What about the Economist's Syria comparison? First of all, Syria's civil war
has not just created a massive "outflow" of refugees. It also created an
enormous population of internally displaced people, as wars typically do. As
of 2017, Syria had 6 million people forcibly displaced within its borders.
Another 5 million refugees were still living in three bordering countries
(Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey). That brings the total of those forcibly
displaced by Syria's civil war to nearly 11 million-almost seven times
larger than the most credible estimate of the numbers displaced (so far) by
Venezuela's economic crisis.
Syria had a population of about 21 million in 2011 when the civil war began.
It has now been estimated to be about 18 million. So more than half of
Syria's 2011 population are now refugees, either internally or externally-a
far cry from the 13 percent of the Venezuelan population claimed by Paez
(and hinted at by the Economist), or the 5 percent (1.6 million) estimated
by the UN's International Organization for Migration to have left since
2015.
In absolute terms, Colombia's population of internally displaced is even
larger than Syria's. As of March 2018, the UNHCR estimated it at 7.7 million
out of total population of about 50 million, or more than one in seven. Of
course, relative to population, Syria's internally displaced population is
vastly larger than Colombia's. Still, 7.7 million internally displaced is a
hell of a disaster to sweep under the rug, but those are the benefits of
being a government in the good graces of the US and its allies.
The Economist doesn't mention that US policy (backed by the entire Western
establishment) is to use harsh and illegal economic sanctions to
deliberately make Venezuela's economic crisis worse, which will help drive
more people to leave the country. US economist Mark Weisbrot, who was
recently given a very rare bit of space to state this fact, noted afterwards
that
"
Brian Ellsworth, a journalist for Reuters who reports from Venezuela, has
joined the latest avalanche of trolls, bots and blowhards who swarmed me
because I dared to mention on BBC World TV, on Friday night, that Trump's
financial embargo against Venezuela makes it more difficult for any
government to stabilize the economy-a fact that no economist would dispute.
Indeed, that is the purpose of the embargo.
The Western establishment includes prominent human rights groups, who often
express the same imperial perspective one finds in the Economist. By citing
these outfits, corporate media seem to provide critical assessments that are
independent of Western officialdom. Don't buy it. Amnesty International has
refused to oppose US economic sanctions on Venezuela, and has also refused
to denounce flagrant efforts by US officials to incite a military coup.
Amnesty's Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas tweeted the dubious
Economist article comparing Venezuela to Syria.
Kenneth Roth praises John McCain on Twitter
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth (Twitter, 8/26/18)
praised John McCain's not-so-principled stance on torture.
Guevara-Rosas also tweeted out an article praising John McCain. McCain's
death has been a real "teachable moment," showing how tiny the ideological
differences are between corporate media and the human rights industry. Four
different Human Rights Watch (HRW) officials used their Twitter accounts to
spread praise for McCain. In 2011, McCain tried to have Venezuela placed on
the US "sponsors of terrorism" list-not scary at all, coming from a man who
joked about bombing Iran. McCain dutifully echoed the Venezuelan
opposition's line (also the Western media line, and HRW's line) that the
country is a "dictatorship."
Ken Roth (HRW's executive director) said McCain "will be remembered for his
firm, principled opposition to torture, especially by Bush, a member of his
own party." Jose Miguel Vivanco said McCain was "a giant in North America
politics and an ally in the defense of human rights." Sarah Margon, HRW's
Washington director, said that McCain's death "feels exceptionally tough for
those of us who have fought for human decency and basic rights alongside and
with him." Dinah PoKempner, HRW's general counsel, spread an article that
called McCain a "war hero."
HRW followed up with an official statement saying McCain "was for decades a
compassionate voice for US foreign and national security policy."
And, of course, the Economist's obituary (8/30/18) similarly laid the praise
on thick, casting McCain as part of a heroic Republican "resistance" to
Donald Trump: "The talk was never straighter, the stance never more upright,
than when he called on his fellow Republicans not just to endure, but to
resist." McCain voted with Trump 83 percent of the time, according to the
FiveThirtyEight website.
The victims of empire are never more invisible than when it is time to
whitewash a departed warmonger. McCain's "war hero" credibility stems from
being a direct perpetrator of, and not simply a cheerleader for, the mass
slaughter in Vietnam that took the lives of millions of people-or "gooks,"
as McCain unapologetically preferred to call them. It is left to independent
voices like Max Blumenthal (Consortium News, 8/27/18), to review McCain's
bloodthirsty record:
"
McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold
War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted
campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came
to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another
to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.
In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in
Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.
While McCain's Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry
lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of
human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on
his grave.
Unless there is radical change-real "resistance"-that transforms the
organizations that people rely on to be "informed" (media and NGOs
included), Donald Trump, like Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, will
eventually be whitewashed as well.
Joe Emersberger /
