On January 9, 2025, days after rejecting a paid ad denouncing the genocide in Gaza for using the word “genocide,” The New York Times published, “Historians condemn Israel’s ‘scholasticide.’ The question is why.” The Association of Historians in the United States had voted overwhelmingly to condemn the bombing and total eradication of schools and universities in Gaza, as well as the killing of professors and students under tons of bombs. The featured article questioned the reasons for the condemnation and accused universities of being politicized.
Days earlier, CNN, the anti-Trump network, reflected on his expansionist proposals: “Trump is dealing with national security issues; he must confront a new world shaped by the rise of China… Trump’s reflections on terminating the Panama Canal Treaty show concern about the invasion of foreign powers in the Western Hemisphere. This is nothing new: it has been a constant theme in history, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, when European colonialists were the threat. The problem persisted through the communist fears of the Cold War. Today’s usurpers are China, Russia, and Iran…” Invasion, threat, usurpers… The same hypocritical journalism as always, complicit in genocidal and kleptomaniacal power.
For Latin America, the usurpers have always been the United States. It was a journalist, John O’Sullivan, who created the myth of Manifest Destiny to justify the dispossession and massacre of Native peoples to the West and South, always based on God’s love for one ethnicity―the one with the cannon. In 1852, O’Sullivan wrote: “This continent and its adjacent islands belong to the whites; the blacks must remain enslaved…”
When President James Polk found an excuse to invade Mexico and steal half of its territory, he did so by provoking a false flag attack. “It is time to expand freedom to other territories,” he said, referring to the reinstatement of slavery in a country that had outlawed it. His soldiers and generals, Ulysses Grant, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott, recognized the farce. General Ethan Hitchcock wrote: “We have no right to be here. The government has sent us to provoke the Mexicans so as to create a pretext for a war that will allow us to take California.”
The new mass press of the time, thanks to the invention of the rotary press, was the main instrument of fake news that sent thousands of volunteers to invade Mexico and, as generals like Scott reported, to kill, rob, and “rape women in front of their own children and husbands.”[1] Apparently, the United States was not sending its best men. On June 16, 2015, Trump was celebrated as he began his presidential campaign by stating, “Mexico is sending people with problems… They are rapists.”
When in 1846 Polk heard of a minor incident on Mexican territory, he rushed to Congress and reported: the invader “has spilled American blood on American soil.” Lincoln, who had opposed the war (Ulysses Grant would call it «the rotten war»), had to withdraw from politics for years. Nothing is more effective at silencing criticism than warlike patriotism.
The same happened for 150 years. The myth of the sinking of the Maine in Cuba was invented by the yellow press, the business of Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst. Years later, the media magnate Hearst defended Hitler and accused F.D. Roosevelt of being a communist. The press presented Hitler as a patriot, just as it now presents Netanyahu as an instrument of God.
In 1933, the most decorated general of his generation, Smedley Butler, published: “The flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag… Our wars have been planned by capitalist nationalism. I have served in the Navy for 33 years as the muscle of Wall Street and big business… I have been a mobster for capitalism…” He was not imprisoned for his crime of opinion (as was the case with the socialist candidate Eugene Debs for opposing the First World War); a more common resource was used: the military hero was discredited as someone with psychological problems.
Johnson and Kissinger also invested millions of dollars in the press to support the genocidal war in Vietnam with massive bombings and chemical weapons. By then, the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird had already inoculated the major newspapers of Latin America with fake news and editorials written in Miami. It did the same with U.S. media, with books, literary reviews, and films. The ideological police benefited big companies, while leaving hundreds of thousands massacred only in Central America, all in the name of national security that produced strategic insecurity.
Before the massive invasion of Iraq was launched in 2003 (which left one million dead, millions displaced, and a Middle East in chaos), we published in the newspapers of marginalized countries about the illogicality of the narrative that justified it. But the hegemonic press managed to convince Americans that the drums of war were telling the truth. The New York Times took a position in favor of the invasion as a patriotic act and one of «national security.» Once again, in the name of patriotism, there was censorship by law (the Patriot Act) and social harassment of all critics. The media couldn’t show images of soldiers returning in coffins. Even less so the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians massacred by this collective cowardice that only profited the usual merchants.
Years after George W. Bush and his puppet, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, admitted that the reasons for the invasion were false («intelligence error»), most Fox News consumers continued to believe in the lie that had been debunked by its own perpetrators—they had been trained since childhood to believe against all evidence as if it were a divine merit.
The big media outlets that sell themselves as independent and guardians of democracy depend not only on a handful of wealthy advertisers but also on billions of dollars that corporations and lunatics like Elon Musk donate to political parties. A perfect business: with the same dollar they use to buy politicians during campaigns, they buy the media that promotes them. The media is part of this plutocratic dictatorship, and their job (which is no different from that of the priests who gave sermons in churches and cathedrals funded by the nobility) is to invent a reality contrary to the facts, complicit with the great power of money, imperialism, and racism. All in the name of democracy, international law, and diversity.
As we formulated in P = d.t, the West will radicalize censorship of critics for the simple reason that their power is declining and so is their tolerance. Since classical Greece, freedom of expression has been a luxury of empires that feel threatened by no criticism.
Jorge Majfud, May 2025
[1] Majfud, Jorge. The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America. Rebelde Ed., 2021/ Humanus 2025.
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