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The American Media and the Ayatollah: Now What?
Hop in the time capsule and set the calendar for the 1930’s.
Specifically set the date for September 21, 1930 and then pick up the New York Times. Here’s the headline in the Times that day, replete with the Times-provided capital letters:
HITLER, DRIVING FORCE IN GERMANY'S FASCISM; His Fiery Oratory Has Won Men of All Classes to Support Doctrine of "National Bolshevism" Spectacular Rise to Power. He Has Energy and Reserve. GERMANY'S “DUCE"
The Times story reports:
Today, five years after his release from prison, he stands as the leader of the second strongest political party in Germany, challenging the very life of the republic. Acknowledged leader of German youth, he is hailed by millions as the German Mussolini, come to free Germany from domestic depression and the foreign yoke. When, some time in the middle of next month, the new Reichstag chosen on Sept. 14 assembles in the gray pile facing the Platz der Republic, no less than 107 Fascists, members of the National Socialist Workers' Party--Hitler's party--will occupy seats in the legislative assembly.
One doesn’t need to detail the results of all this free media for Hitler from The Times, of which there was much more over the years before Germany under his leadership nine years later formally launched World War II with its September, 1939 invasion of Poland.
Without question, not only did the German people of the day know well who this guy was, so over the years of the 1930s, did the American people get to know who he was. They knew because the American media of the day covered him repeatedly, as shown by that Times story.
In the case of the Germans, they rallied to him anyway. In the case of the Americans, the American media coverage of Hitler launched debates aplenty inside America about what to do about him, if anything. Which said as much about the American media and the pro and anti-war activists inside the U.S. and the media as it did about Hitler.
The point here is simple. With a lesson hopefully learned about the importance of the American media paying serious attention to wannabe dictators in various global hotspots and what happens if no seriously scrutinizing attention is paid to who they really are and what their real intentions are, disaster - global disaster - can follow. By surprise if no attention is being paid. In fact, if attention is paid by the media - and the millions of average citizens follow a bad guy anyway? Then everybody - starting with the American President of the moment - can and should be aware that trouble lies ahead.
Modern case in point?
One suspects most Americans have no idea who Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is. Khamenei is, by title, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran - and has been for some 35 years. Unlike Hitler in the 1930’s - as that 1930 New York Times story profiling Hitler indicates - Khamenei is, thanks to a lack of intense and serious coverage by the American media, essentially unknown to most Americans.
And this has consequences.
Hitler’s rise in the 1930’s and the considerable media coverage that went with it eventually meant that as the 1930’s moved forward there was increasing debate not just in Germany but in American politics as well about Hitler, about his friendship with neighboring Italy’s dictator Mussolini and, eventually, about the relationship of Germany with the rising fascists of Japan. And all this was accompanied with a debate about what to do about Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese.
The fact that the American isolationists and anti-war activists of the 1930s carried so much weight and for some time prevented America from declaring war on all three was telling. So too was the lack of support for sending in the troops, which was nothing more than a real testament that millions of Americans - with bitter memories of Americans sent to die on the European battlefields of World War I and who paid attention to the media of the day - knew that there was, in fact, a problem looming (again!) on the international scene. And somewhere along the line a decision would have to be made by rank-and-file Americans about what to do about it.
The American media turned a real spotlight on prominent anti-war activists like one Charles Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy” (as he was nicknamed) internationally famous in the day for making the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
Also in the spotlight was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decidedly isolationist U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. That would be one Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a passel of Kennedy kids, one of whom would decades later become America’s 35th President. (And whose father, in that fabled 1960 presidential campaign of then-Senator John F. Kennedy, became a bit of an issue as the Kennedy campaign tried, mostly successfully, to ignore the elder Kennedy’s reputation for his by then long-ago pre-war isolationism.)
In today’s world, mere days ago the Iranian Ayatollah who has had so little media attention paid to him in the American media - had The Times apparently feeling compelled to run this headline:
Who Is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader?
The cleric has ruled for more than three decades, spearheading a policy of backing proxy groups to wield influence across the Middle East.
In other words, Iran’s “Supreme Leader” the Ayatollah “has ruled for more than three decades” yet, it is surely safe to say, millions of Americans have absolutely no idea who he is, what he has done as Iran’s ruler, and what may or may not be his objectives down the road in ruling Iran. This being the case because the American media did not pay Khamenei much attention earlier, much less the kind of attention they paid to Hitler early on in the 1930s.
Only now, as it comes clear thanks to Israel, that Iran has been quietly building a nuclear enrichment program and appears headed towards building an arsenal of nuclear weapons designed, so go the news accounts, to wipe the free, democratic and Jewish Israel off the face of the earth - and potentially attack America itself - along with who knows who else is the American media finally getting around to giving the Ayatollah some serious attention.
All of which is to say, if the American media has not been asleep at the computer keyboard-they have at a minimum looked the other way as the Ayatollah has gone about his ambitious, potentially globally ruinous business “for more than three decades.” That Khamenei is known for declaring “Death to America” repeatedly to various crowds in various settings is, one suspects, news to millions of Americans who have not seen saturated coverage like this from American media.
Which in turn should probably move the American media to finally start asking two questions of themselves. Those questions?
How did we miss what Iran was doing? And now what?
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