In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Phil Wilayto, Editor of the Virginia Defender newspaper and co-founder of the Virginia Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality to discuss political repression in Ukraine and US media’s silence on it as the media continues to cast the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as one between democracy and autocracy, how this crackdown on dissent relates to Ukraine’s recent political history and the embrace of fascism by some elements of the Ukrainian government, and what this repression means in the current context of conflict in Ukraine.
In the second segment, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Onyesonwu Chatoyer, organizer with the All-African People's Revolutionary Party and editor with Hood Communist to discuss how empathy is weaponized by the corporate media to serve the foreign policy objective of the US and to choose who deserves empathy, how that weaponization of empathy is currently being used to justify western intervention in Ukraine, and how the media has historically used empathy to justify other imperialist interventions and sell naked imperialism to people.
In the third segment, Sean and Jacquie discuss a clip from Mumia Abu-Jamal discussing the propaganda effect of the idea of the United States as the “shining city upon a hill,” the historical use of this idea to justify the United States’ history of conquest, and how this mythology obscures the real history of the United States.
Later in the show, Sean and Jacquie are joined by Esther Iverem, artist, author and independent journalist, and host and producer of On The Ground: Voices of Resistance from the Nation’s Capital, which you can listen to as a podcast and on Pacifica Radio to discuss reports that refugees of color from Ukraine are being kept in European Union detention centers despite assurances to the contrary at the beginning of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the double standard employed to deny asylum to Black refugees and accept thousands of Ukrainian refugees who according to the Peace Corps may hold racist views against Black people, the massive propaganda campaign that has been waged to manufacture consent for conflict with Russia, and the hypocrisy of calls to keep Russia accountable to international law despite its failure to stop US imperialism.
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