"It is uplifting to lose one's faith in a reality which looks the way it is described in a newspaper." [From Die Fackel [The Torch], periodical, Karl Kraus, Vienna: 1911-36]

By OTTO

April 5, 2004

et's define some terms carefully and then use them to rate some statements from a New York Times editorial that expressed that paper's reaction to the killing of 4 US agents in Falluja, Iraq on March 31, 2004. The following definitions are from Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition.

Stupid, adj.

1. in a state of stupor; dazed; stunned; stupefied.
2. lacking normal intelligence or understanding; slow-witted; dull.
3. showing or resulting from a lack of normal intelligence; foolish; irrational.
4. dull and boring; tiresome

SYN.—stupid implies such lack of intelligence or incapacity for perceiving, learning, etc. as might be shown by one in a mental stupor; dull implies a mental sluggishness that may be constitutional or may result from overfatigue, disease, etc.; dense suggests thickheadedness or obtuseness (e.g., too dense to take a hint); slow suggests that the quickness, but not necessarily the capacity to learn is below average; retarded implies a being behind others of the same age or class because of mental deficiency or slowness in learning (e.g., a retarded pupil).

With that inventory of descriptive terms at our disposal, let's take a few sentences from the NYT's editorial [the text from the editorial is in boldface].

• ...the emotional force of those pictures of burned Americans hanging from a bridge in the Iraqi town of Falluja was devastating.

  So far so good. He admits that he was emotionally devastated, meaning something was destroyed: Perhaps his illusions, e.g., about the gratitude the Iraqi people would show their American liberators?

• ...hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis have been killed in this war...

  This is the standard construction of an apologist for an aggressor: War as pestilence, an act of God or blind nature, not the planned agency of a gang of war criminals. This puts the aggressor and his victim on the same moral plane.

• ...the grisly deaths of these four security consultants — ambushed, burned, mutilated, dragged through the streets — struck a deep nerve.

  A deep nerve? How about deep memory? We all took history in school. We learned about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and lynching in the old Confederacy. This writer's failure to make the most obvious connections between the past and the present suggests that he is stupid, dense, and retarded.

• ...letting those emotions shape the future of American occupation policy in Iraq — pushing it either toward vengeful reprisals or toward a panicky, casualty-driven withdrawal — would be a terrible mistake.

  Having established his intellectual qualifications, this pretentious moron now gets, of all things, gratuitously preachy.

• What the horrific images from Falluja should convey is that the fundamental problem is in Iraq itself.

  Not in the US? The lies justifying the war, its planning and execution, and the legislation authorizing its funding, were all made in the United States. Even Dubya knows this. This sentence earns its writer a rating of stupid, dull, dense and retarded.

• ...the course this page has long championed...

  What this paper championed was war. It did so by relentlessly printing scare headlines that Iraq had chemical weapons that it was ready to use against the United States. Here are some samples:

  • FOREIGN DESK | November 1, 2001, Thursday
    A NATION CHALLENGED: BIOTERROR TREATY; U.S. SEEKS CHANGES IN GERM WAR PACT
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | November 11, 2001, Sunday
    A NATION CHALLENGED: CHEMICAL WEAPONS; Al Qaeda Sites Point to Tests Of Chemicals
    By JAMES RISEN and JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | November 19, 2001, Monday
    A NATION CHALLENGED: BIOTERROR; U.S. Publicly Accusing 5 Countries of Violating Germ-Weapons Treaty
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | December 20, 2001, Thursday
    A NATION CHALLENGED: SECRET SITES; Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | April 20, 2002, Saturday
    A NATION CHALLENGED: PLOTS; Qaeda Leader In U.S. Custody Provokes Alert
    By JUDITH MILLER and PHILIP SHENON
  • FOREIGN DESK | May 7, 2002, Tuesday
    Washington Accuses Cuba Of Germ-Warfare Research
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | September 8, 2002, Sunday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS
    By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | September 13, 2002, Friday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: BAGHDAD'S ARSENAL; White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons
    By JUDITH MILLER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
  • FOREIGN DESK | September 14, 2002, Saturday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: TERRORIST WEAPONS; Lab Suggests Qaeda Planned To Build Arms, Officials Say
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | November 12, 2002, Tuesday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: CHEMICAL WEAPONS; IRAQ SAID TO TRY TO BUY ANTIDOTE AGAINST NERVE GAS
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | December 3, 2002, Tuesday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: GERM WEAPONS; C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | January 24, 2003, Friday
    THREATS AND RESPONSES: INTELLIGENCE; Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | April 24, 2003, Thursday
    AFTEREFFECTS: THE SEARCH; U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled With Chemical Agents
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | May 4, 2003, Sunday
    AFTEREFFECTS: SEARCH FOR WEAPONS; U.S. Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | May 11, 2003, Sunday
    AFTEREFFECTS: THE HUNT FOR EVIDENCE; Trailer is a Mobile Lab Capable of Turning Out Bioweapons, a Team Says
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | May 12, 2003, Monday
    AFTEREFFECTS: WEAPONS SLEUTHS; Radioactive Material Found At a Test Site Near Baghdad
    By JUDITH MILLER
  • FOREIGN DESK | May 21, 2003, Wednesday
    AFTEREFFECTS: GERM WEAPONS; U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs To Germ Arms
    By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

  This partial list of headlines over stories printed by the NYT shows that it is as guilty as the Bush regime for the death and destruction it ordered rained on Iraq and that besides the project of advancing US global domination, the Times aided and abetted the Pentagon in its craven project of using Iraq and its people as a living laboratory for testing its latest weapons systems.

  That the writer of this editorial forgot or never understood what his own newspaper printed in the last two years earns him a rating of retarded.

  There's something else we all learned in high school: The story of William Randolph Hearst's "yellow journalism" and how it paved the way for America's first step on the road of imperialism, the Spanish American War. Mistakenly, we assumed that the universal condemnation of Hearst's provocation would prevent it from ever happening again. We were wrong. Yellow journalism is back, or perhaps it never ended. It just got slicker. Until this war. The sheer stupidity of the Bush crowd and its collaborators at the New York Times in promoting a lie that would inevitably be exposed has blown their cover.

  We can also thank the heroic resistance of the Iraqi people. Had they acquiesced in their conquest, the media hacks would have had an easy time covering their tracks. The American people owe them a profound debt of gratitude.

  At the simple burial of Saddam Hussein's sons and his nephew, whose deaths so overjoyed the bloodlust of the US media that they momentarily lost control of themselves, one of the mourners told a reporter, "We will drive you out of Iraq on your knees." For the world, that would be the best possible outcome of this latest US aggression.

That people this egregiously stupid are allowed to express the editorial policy of a major newspaper in a country that claims the right to rule the world is scandalous.