In an article about Haiti, the Washington Post had this to say about armed thugs who are now entering Haiti's cities:
The men were also part of the armed rebellion that led Aristide to resign in February and flee the country.
"Resign...and flee the country?"
Anyone coming to this article without any previous knowledge of the relevant background would be left completely unaware that Aristide actually says that he absolutely did not resign, and that he was "kidnapped" and removed from the country by the US in what he called "a modern coup d'etat"...and that Aristide's version of events is corroborated by eyewitnesses, including the caretaker at his residence and one of his senior bodyguards.
By fiat, in a single clause, the Washington Post has recreated reality: Aristide resigned, and fled. And the US involvement in his ouster has vanished. An inconvenient bit of history is simply gone.
This happens in the mainstream media all the time--witness how effectively the US media suppressed inconvenient facts like Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1984 during the runup to the 2003 Iraq war--but for some reason this one struck me as particularly chilling. I couldn't help but think of Orwell's 1984: "Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia."
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