Ben Rhodes Takes a Play Out of North Korea’s Playbook to Sell the Iran Deal By: Benjamin Weingarten –
See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/05/ben-rhodes-takes-play-out-north-koreas-playbook-to-sell-iran-deal#sthash.qyLoScV6.dpuf
One way to evaluate the direction of 21st century Western civilization is to ask whether free nations are acting more like totalitarian ones, or vice versa. A recent story highlighting modern-day North Korea indicates a depressing parallel between America and a nation where opponents of the ruling regime are rumored to be fed to the dogs – or at least executed by firing squad.
In “I went to North Korea and was told I ask too many questions,” the Washington Post’s Anna Fifield describes a visit to a Pyongyang maternity hospital during a state-organized media tour. During the visit to what we gather is a Potemkin hospital, a medical facility set up for pure publicity that misrepresents the true state of the country’s healthcare industry, Fifield asks a series of questions met with propaganda, obfuscation and not-so-curious inconsistency.
The reporter’s handlers rush her through a tour of the hospital, showing “state-of-the-art” Siemens equipment marked to show the technology is a gift from “Respected Leader Kim Jung Un.” Supposedly domestically produced machines are nowhere to be found. Staffers turn on a CT scanner to reveal password protection that cannot be cracked.
How can an administration’s words be at all trusted when frauds with profound consequences like the Iran deal and Obamacare are foisted so audaciously on the American people?
The trip ends with a visit to a room in one ward with “a nicely made-up woman sitting on the bed in pink pajamas…there were no personal effects on the bedside table or in the connecting bathroom, there was no medical chart on the end of the bed or even a glass of water on her bedside table.”
Fifield remarks that several reporters on the Pyongyang trip were allowed to conduct street corner interviews one morning:
The punchline of Fifield’s reporting is telling: “[E]very step of the way, a journalist is left asking herself: Where does reality end and artifice begin? How much is staged and how much is spontaneous?”
Does not the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction and state stage-management perfectly reflect the job description of White House deputy national security adviser for strategic communications Ben Rhodes? For Rhodes’ chief task, like that of the North Korean hospital handlers, has been to craft a narrative — that is to turn the regime’s fictions into reality.
Most conspicuously in the case of the Iran Deal, Rhodes created a fairytale out of whole cloth and then manipulated an all-too-willing cast of 27-year-old-useful idiots in American journalists into amplifying the big lie about a “moderate” genocidal jihadist regime and its willingness to disarm.The author of the now-infamous New York Times Magazine’s profile of Ben Rhodes, David Samuels, writes that the “story of the Iran deal…was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal.” The former (and apparently current) fiction writer Rhodes led a propaganda operation choreographed much like a trip for journalists through a Pyongyang hospital, replete with rapid-fire responses to questions and criticisms. “We created an echo chamber,” says Rhodes. Fifield writes that the North Koreans pressured her with their own echo chamber: “I felt the five or so hospital staffers and my guides forming a tighter circle around me, hands on my back trying to move me along to avoid missing out on other parts of the tour.”
And as with the North Koreans, there is a sense that among Rhodes and the Obama administration the emperor has no clothes. How is it that a thirty-eight-year old fiction writer by trade is at all qualified to serve as “the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself,” according to the dozens of White House insiders Samuels interviewed? How can an administration’s words be at all trusted when frauds with profound consequences like the Iran deal and Obamacare are foisted so audaciously on the American people? If narrative trumps truth, what happens when truth exposes that the narrative as a naked lie and thousands or even millions of lives are lost?
America is not North Korea, and manipulating the press, or “spinning,” is what politicians do. But the more Washington D.C. fiction — like a North Korean hospital tour — becomes reality, the less free our nation becomes.
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/05/ben-rhodes-takes-play-out-north-koreas-playbook-to-sell-iran-deal#sthash.qyLoScV6.dpuf
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