What We’re Up Against: The elites, the blacklist, and the “mainstream” media

05-18-2011 • AntiWar.com

The intellectual atmosphere of this country, especially when it comes to the question of war and peace, is absurdly narrow: we are faced with a “choice” between partisan brands of interventionism, between the unilateral belligerency of the neoconservative right and the self-righteous “multi-lateral” interventionism of the Obama crowd. The two factions, however, are variations on a single theme of American (or Western) global hegemony, a “world order” ruled from Washington, London, and Paris. A multinational “elite” which owes loyalty to nothing but its own power and privileged existence has detached itself from the common herd: while the rest of us struggle to survive at the bottom. The aristocrats of the global order, who live in state-supported- and-subsidized luxury, are concentrated in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C., where they hand the media their “talking points.” These pundits and “journalists” are little more than servitors of the royal court. Indeed, the media is part and parcel of this elite class. Here’s Andrew Sullivan, the noted blogger and former “warblogger,” now a big Obama fan, writing about the elite’s knee-jerk defense of accused rapist and IMF chief honcho Dominique Strauss-Kahn: “Elites find it hard to believe the worst of our own – just as families do members of their kin.”