We are better than North Korea.

[woo me with science]

That's the message I got from corporate media this morning. I learned that Kim Jong-Un had his own uncle murdered, because he did not clap enthusiastically enough when Kim Jong-Un was selected as Supreme Leader of North Korea.

This breathless report included a specific reassurance that Obama had no power to stop the killing.

I mention this news item because of an important point that several have made here recently, that I think is important enough to warrant its own post. I think Sabrina1 expressed it clearly and succinctly in this thread about strip searching in America, ...but it is relevant to any issue connected to our increasingly corporate and authoritarian government.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4193570

Neither she nor anyone else no matter what they are accused of, should be treated like a criminal until it is determined that they are a criminal. After which they should serve their sentence during which time they should be treated humanely.

It's sad when we have to say 'but we're better than prisons in dictatorships'. The comparison should be to other Democratic nations, not to third world countries run by dictators.

Let's make that bigger:

[font size=3]The comparison should be to other Democratic nations, not to third world countries run by dictators.

[/font size]

Stop and think for a minute. When was the last time you heard our corporate media compare any aspect of our policing and prison system to, say, Norway's? Or our educational system to Finland's, or New Zealand's? Or our health care system to ANY of any of the many democratic, developed countries that manage to provide actual care to citizens without brutally impoverishing them? When was the last time corporate media even for a moment directed our attention to countries that routinely score well above us now on lists of well being and government effectiveness for people? When are Americans ever given even a glimpse of what these countries do, and what life is like for people there?

In our corporate media world, it is as though these places, these systems, do not even exist.

Instead, we are fed a steady diet of comparisons of ourselves to some of the most oppressive places on earth in order to feed our sense of complacency and to normalize and minimize the outrages we are increasingly being taught to accept: mass surveillance of our private communications, rampant and increasing poverty and inequality, strangling of our free press and persecution of whistleblowers, chilling of speech and brutal suppression of dissent, and replacement of our representative system of government by a thinly disguised "pay to play" facsimile.

The warping of values and distortion/downgrading of what we accept as "normal" or "necessary" is a fundamental goal of authoritarian propaganda. Corporate propaganda floods us with comparisons of ourselves to North Korea, to Iran, or to Afghanistan, because the authoritarian state they are constructing cannot tolerate public comparison to the countries we SHOULD be comparing ourselves to.

To the countries we SHOULD be comparing ourselves to.

The *only* way that corporatists succeeded for so long in painting progressive policies as "fringe" and "unworkable" and "unrealistic" was by keeping them out of the national debate...acting as if they did not exist. And part of the way they do that is by keeping entire parts of the world that are doing things better, and more humanely than we are, out of our national consciousness.

I learned that we are waaaay better than North Korea today. What did YOU learn about the world today on corporate media?

[Downwinder]

1. Considering that our "enhanced interrogation procedures"

are adapted from N. Korea perhaps your premise is open to debate.

[woo me with science]

2. Certain aspects of their system seem appealing to our elite.

Pouring tremendous amounts of money into militarization is one example, of course. Until recently, though, I didn't think that *any* level of hunger among American citizens would be considered an acceptable trade-off for that.

[El_Johns]

3. K&R