In which the pond gets with the news that the US empire is ending ...

That's an important announcement? Surely the news that an overdose of self-important salt can create hypertension is more important...

But it does show the difficulty the pond faces each day, as the reptiles offer up their smorgasbord of delights ...

What to select, who to choose?

Now there's not much joy in the extremist fundie minor war criminal dog botherer going the extremist fundie barking mad Islamics.

They'd be welcome to each other, except for the collateral damage they cause to innocents who get in the way of their crusades and jihads ...

As for the Bolter, that's easy enough. At heart the pond is a conservative member of the bourgeoisie and doesn't see any fun in assaulting people, either in public or private, though in the Joyce matter, he was preaching love, and got little support from the likes of the Devine, while the Bolter just keeps on preaching hate ...endless reams of hate, fear and loathing ...

How did that old Beatle lyric go? In the end, the hate you take is equal to the hate you make ...

That's not to forgive assault, just to explain how it arises, and how the Murdochians have corrupted public discussion, as they did in the United States...

Never mind, the pond rarely wanders down the hate path with the Bolter - why assist in the spread of palpable fear and loathing? - so it was time to get out the old fickle finger of fate and dust it off ...

Come on down Ian Buruma ...

Hang on, hang on, what's this?

Project Syndicate? It seems so ... here ...

But what's the proud boast of Project Syndicate here ...?

Regardless of ability to pay?

No, scrub that, it should read regardless of ability to pay ... in italics, for emphasis ...

So speaking of fickle fingers and gold bars, what's this in reptile la la land?

It's behind the paywall?

A gold bar is required for free content?

Let's hope they paid Project Syndicate and the good prof a morsel ... even then, taking free content and re-badging it as payworthy content makes the pond feel like pirating a Fox movie this night ...

That said, the prof's message resonated with the pond.

After all, last night on CBC, the pond watched as the Canucks stepped up to the plate, assuring the world that they would replace the Yanks in the world leadership stakes ...

We will strive for leadership in all these multilateral forums. (the full Freeland speech here).

Go Canucks, and so to the Prof ...

Well that's how to deal with the war in Vietnam ... not even mention it by name ... and never mind the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan ...

But it was in the second Buruma gobbet made the pond wonder what the prof had been drinking ...

Now the good prof might think it fun and healthy to protest wars, when in reality the protests didn't for a nanosecond stop the politicians from embracing the folly and engaging in battle (oh and there were eager dogsbotherers clustered around them like fleas to help).

Along with being ignored comes a sense of futility and impotence, and then rage ...

But it was when the prof started to spruik liberal democracy and shared values, as if the pond shared values with the Murdochians, that things came unstuck altogether.

The sticking point came with that line about "Hollywood studios are already censoring the content of movies expected to make money in the Chinese market."

Hollywood has always censored its movies, it being the primary American principal that nothing should get in the road of making a quick buck ... and putting Matt Damon in that epic clunker The Great Wall turns out to be the least of it ...

ABC has always been the mantra, and Americans have always been closing on nonsense about liberal democracy ...especially when they try to pin it on the Chinese, as if it's some sort of new phenomenon, when it's as old as the days when Hollywood destroyed the Australian film industry.

Take the matter of censoring for the Nazis, as recorded in assorted books, and in The New Yorker, here, currently outside the paywall, but with many other stories on the same subject available by googling ...

Most of Breen’s rules centered on sex and language, but the code also included this stricture: “The history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.” The statement was so loose in meaning that it could be used to ban any critical look at a foreign country. By 1934, then, Breen and Gyssling had overlapping briefs. Breen read every script before it went into production, and he used the “fairness” justification to limit or kill any film that touched on Nazi Germany. As J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler put it in their volume “Entertaining America” (2003), a history of Jews and the media, “Breen and his ecclesiastical supporters saw Hitler’s rise as instrumental in their campaign to reform Hollywood. Nazi politics and anti-Semitic agitation had made Jewish studio executives newly vulnerable.” 

At several points in the mid-nineteen-thirties, an agent named Al Rosen—eager to become a producer—attempted to raise money for a project called “The Mad Dog of Europe.” The screenplay, which had been bouncing around Hollywood since 1933, was about the destruction of a German-Jewish family during Hitler’s rise to power. No studio had attached itself to the project, but the script got to Breen’s office, and Breen took the matter seriously. In a long memo, he wrote:

"Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful." 

 This kind of reasoning, with its open threat, effectively killed the project and maimed many others.

In 1936, M-G-M acquired Sinclair Lewis’s best-seller “It Can’t Happen Here,” a semi-satirical fantasia about American totalitarianism: a Huey Long-type demagogue takes over the Presidency, and rules by means of the secret police. When M-G-M geared up to shoot the movie, with prominent actors, including Lionel Barrymore and James Stewart, Breen wrote a letter to Will Hays, saying, “It is hardly more than a story portraying the Hitlerization of the United States of America. It is an attempt to bring home to American citizens, through the instrumentality of the screen, that which is transpiring in Germany today.” (That it certainly was.) Breen also wrote Louis B. Mayer, the president of M-G-M, a seven-page letter proposing sixty cuts in the screenplay—in effect, making a Production Code seal hostage to impossible demands. Even if the cuts were made, he wrote to Mayer, the movie would be subject “to the most minute criticism on all sides,” which “may result in enormous difficulty to your studio.” Mayer cancelled the project. 

Breen continued to pressure the studios not to mention Nazism right up to the outbreak of war. In 1938, when M-G-M wanted to adapt “Three Comrades,” an explicitly anti-Nazi novel by Remarque, Breen insisted that the movie be set earlier in time. “Thus we will get away from any possible suggestion that we are dealing with Nazi violence or terrorism.” The pattern was clear: no matter how vicious Nazi conduct was, any representation of it could be deemed a violation of the code’s demand that foreign countries be treated “fairly.” In practice, the more cruel and irrational the Nazis got, the safer they were from any Hollywood dramatization of their actions. Breen warned the studios of the danger to their German earnings, but his real intent was probably to remind the men running Hollywood that they should never feel safe.

And so on and endlessly on, though Sinclair Lewis's prediction about a demagogue taking over the Presidency has at last turned from satire into prophecy.

The pond could go on about interning Japanese in the second world war, the treatment of people under Joe McCarthy, the behaviour of fundamentalist Christians towards secularists, gays and TG folk, and the jailing and shooting of black citizens,  but let's just say that outside a few big cities in the United States, talk of liberal democracy in the United States is just so much hot air and blather.

There's always been a Charles Lindbergh  in the country, there's always been devotees of eugenics, and every other fundamentalist trend towards fascism, with the entire GOP now having lurched in that direction ... and now pace Sinclair Lewis, it has happened there, and they have their very own Senator Berzullus "Buzz" Windrip, now with bonus orange hair, in the White House ...

Ignoring well-known history compounded when the good prof tries to sound the alarum about western media.

The pond couldn't resist rolling Jaffas down the aisle. What, we should care about Fox News, and its carefully crafted objectivity, fair and balanced news reporting?

The Murdochians will be under increased pressure?

Cameron, Osborne and Murdoch back together at mogul's Christmas knees-up ...

Murdoch's Dealings in China: It's Business, and It's Personal ...

Mr. Murdoch has flattered Communist Party leaders and done business with their children. His Fox News network helped China’s leading state broadcaster develop a news Web site. He joined hands with the Communist Youth League, a power base in the ruling party, in a risky television venture, his China managers and advisers say...
...Mr. Murdoch cooperates closely with China’s censors and state broadcasters, several people who worked for him in China say. He cultivates political ties that he hopes will insulate his business ventures from regulatory interference, these people say. In speeches and interviews, Mr. Murdoch often supports the policies of Chinese leaders and attacks their critics. A group of China-based reporters for The Journal accused him in a letter to Dow Jones shareholders of “sacrificing journalistic integrity to satisfy personal and political aims,” a charge the News Corporation denies.

Well the rogue copped a dud that time with Star, but pardon the pond indulging in a Sierra Madre, dry as gold dust in the wind, laugh at the prof's talk of the Chinese threat to western media...

The Russians looked at Fox News, and lo, there came RT, and it was good ...

The west is built on freedom of expression?

Uh huh, someone put that thought behind a paywall ...

There you go, done and gold bar dusted ... and so to a Pope cartoon,  coincidentally featuring a turtle country in despair, with more infallible Pope here ...