The Recent Russian Past Is Our Near Future

Excellent essay from Billmon on the establishment's whitewashing Bush-era crimes:

You can see this in just about all of the transition coverage. Reporters (like the ones responsible for the journalistic abomination above) and columnists and pundits are busy cranking out the usual lame duck legacy stories, as if this were the "normal" end of a "normal" presidency, instead of the concluding chapter of a national tragedy.

There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy -- to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all -- and how the story is being treated in the corporate media.

It's not quite Pravda -- at least some of the hard questions are being asked, if only half-heartedly -- but it still has some of the same barely concealed, everybody-knows-even-though-we-are-not-allowed-to-say quality of Soviet discourse in the USSR's terminal Potemkin Village phase. It's as if keeping up the pretense -- observing the customary rituals as handed down by the priests of High Broderism -- is all most of the press corpses know how to do any more, or care to do.

And, as in late Soviet times, the absurdity of the official story line is only reinforced by the other systemic failures that surround it: in our case, financial collapse, plunging asset prices, massive fraud and a corrupt, sclerotic political system that may be incapable of doing even the most simple, obvious things (like printing and spending sufficient quantities of fiat money) to stave off an deeper downward spiral.

This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier -- skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.

This sounds about right in terms of the political reality. And this of course completely ignores the even deeper uglier truths of 9/11 etc that the establishment will NEVER touch. Which again is why we need to build our own media, and sink the criminal mainstream media.