CounterVortex

Greewald shills for Dilma… of course

Without fail, the grievous Glenn Greenwald rushes to the defense of Dilma Rousseff. All the predictable rhetoric is on display in his piece for The Intercept:

In reporting on Brazil, Western media outlets have most prominently focused on the increasingly large street protests demanding the impeachment of Rousseff. They have typically depicted those protests in idealized, cartoon terms of adoration: as an inspiring, mass populist uprising against a corrupt regime… That narrative is, at best, a radical oversimplification of what is happening and, more often, crass propaganda designed to undermine a left-wing party long disliked by U.S. foreign policy elites…

The effort to remove Dilma and her party from power now resembles a nakedly anti-democratic power struggle more than a legally sound process or genuine anti-corruption movement. Worse, it’s being incited, engineered, and fueled by the very factions who are themselves knee-deep in corruption scandals, and who represent the interests of the richest and most powerful societal segments long angry at their inability to defeat PT democratically.

Of course we have the bogus propaganda word "narrative," implying that the other guys' POV is merely subjective, while here you are reading the Straight Dope. Ironically, that word is almost always employed by those with the most bias of all. Can you imagine Greenwald's vitriol if Obama re-appointed Clinton to the cabinet to shield her from prosecution in the e-mail scandal? But when Dilma does same for Lula, he spouts the party line about how the protesters are all bourgeois puppets of imperialism—the same propaganda routinely used in Argentina and in Venezuela. And this is the same Brazilian regime that is screwing over the Brazilian poor by seizing their lands to build stadiums all over the damn place, and terrorizing them with murderous police to create an attractive climate for foreign capital. And turning the country's natural resoueces over to the extractive interests. Is the right-wing opposition exploiting the protests? That goes without saying. But "inciting" and "engineering"? As if nobody had any legitimate reason to be pist at Dilma? Come on.

We are treated to a photo that apparently went viral among Dilma's supporters purporting to show a well-heeled couple out for the protest with their pure-breed dog on a leash—and a Black nanny pushing the baby carriage. It has apparently been posted with snarky captions like "Speed it up there, Maria [the generic 'maid name'], we have to get out to protest against this government that made us pay you minimum wage." Yet apart from the couple's matching green-and-yellow t-shirts (the colors of the Brazilian flag, adopted by the right-opposition), there is nothing in the photo to indicate they are actually out for a protest as opposed to, say, lunch or shopping. Do even bourgeois types typically bring their pets and tots to protests where cops are likely to use pepper-spray? Just asking. Greenwald certainly doesn't.

The closest he comes to acknowledging any legitimate greivances is this:

None of this is a defense of PT. Both because of genuine widespread corruption in that party and national economic woes, Dilma and PT are intensely unpopular among all classes and groups, even including the party’s working-class base. But the street protests — as undeniably large and energized as they have been—are driven by those who are traditionally hostile to PT. The number of people participating in these protests — while in the millions—is dwarfed by the number (54 million) who voted to re-elect Dilma less than two years ago. In a democracy, governments are chosen by voting, not by displays of street opposition—particularly where, as in Brazil, the protests are drawn from a relatively narrow societal segment.

So it's not a defense of the PT… except that he goes on to defend the PT in the next breath, again paint the protesters as dupes incapable of autonomous action, and imply that being elected by a large majority is a license to abuse the populace in peace.

As we have had all too many reasons to ask in recent years: Remember when the left used to fetishize balaclavas and Molotov cocktails? Today it seems to more often fetishize police uniforms and truncheons. What's up with that?