Oliver Boyd-Barrett on "Collective West" vs. the World

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is one of the few American academic experts courageous enough to challenge US and Zionist war propaganda. His article “Crocus Hall in Context: America is Behind This 100% (Ritter)” raises  good questions including: “Did Victoria Nuland have any role in the Crocus Hall acts of terrorism?” His latest article “The Morality and Hypocrisy of Proxy War in a Nuclear Age” opines:

In so many different ways, there is a danger of escalation of the conflict to nuclear status. John Mearsheimer, in interview yesterday with Napolitano, seems to think this is only a small risk. But because the danger of nuclear war may only be “small,” its consequences are unimaginably awful, and the “smallness” of risk (and of course there is plenty of scope for disagreement with Mearsheimer’s assessment) is hardly a good reason for engaging in behavior that breathes continuing life into that small risk.

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is an emeritus professor of Bowling Green State University, Ohio and of California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (California). He continues to teach at the California State University, Camarillo and undertakes occasional lecturing for the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He co-edited  Russiagate Revisited: Aftermath of a Hoax and has authored or edited many other books.

Excerpt:

I really admire your substack. It's crisp, succinct, very detailed. You are keeping abreast of the best alternative media sources as well as the mainstream sources and coming to very sensible conclusions. I guess my first question is, why aren't there more people doing this? There are a lot of smart people in the academy in the West. And most of them are just going along with the outrageous lies and the completely insane and immoral as well as non-strategic foreign policy that the empire is pursuing. So why are you one of a minority?

Well, I think there are two or three different answers to that question, Kevin. First of all, as you can hear, I don't come originally from America. I was born in Ireland. I am an Irish citizen as well as a US citizen. Because of my Irish connections, I am steeped in the history of anti-imperial resistance, in this case the empire being the British Empire. And that's a very useful background for developing a critical consciousness about any form of imperialistic activity. So that's one part of it, at least so far as explaining my own dissidence is concerned.

We're probably cousins, Oliver, since my grandfather was an Irish Barrett.

Indeed, and thank you for mentioning that. Barrett is a very Irish surname and particularly I believe in County Cork where I still have some relatives.

We actually went to County Cork in search of lost relations. Didn't really find any, but maybe I'll go back.

They got out while they could before Ireland was taken over by the neoliberal cabal. But I think, going back to your first question, why is it that there is so little dissidence? I think two factors principally come to mind. First off is the absorption of our mainstream media within the power establishment. Mainstream media have nearly always been mere cogs in much larger corporate machines whose wealth puts them at the very heart of US capitalism. And they have very little interest in upsetting the apple cart against their own business interests in order to be able to stay in the business of running mainstream media enterprises today. You have to be at peace with political authority or you cannot survive. This is true of almost any country, by the way. You cannot survive as a mainstream medium today if you have set yourself in hostile relationship to those who have the hands on political and economic power. So that's always been true. I think it works in cycles. I think borrowing from the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, there are periods when there is so much rivalry, there is so much conflict within elites, that a certain space is opened out for critical thought and critical discourse. And there are periods when that space almost disappears and I think we are at such a moment now. And the reason why the space, the window, so to speak, for dissent in the mainstream media is now so narrow is because the Western world is so threatened. It is a long time since the collective West has felt so threatened—in this instance by the emergence of a multipolar world led first and foremost by China.

So I think the fact that the mainstream media are now so tight with the other centers of power in our society means that even intelligent people who have never been exposed to media studies or never thought very much about the quality of their information infrastructure, their media infrastructure, they're far, far too accepting of the narratives that are spun day by day by organs such as the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times or the Times of London or the Guardian. That is truer now than ever before. They (big media) are arms of the state where matters of the existential survival of the collective West are concerned.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kevinbarrett.substack.com