At the turn of the century, Johann Galtung identified 12 things that the media does wrong when reporting violence.
It's painful how much worse the coverage has gotten since.
Thread.
1/ 1) Decontextualizing violence: focusing on the irrational without looking at the reasons for polarization.
2) Dualism: reducing the number of parties in a conflict to two, when often more are involved.
2/ 3) Manicheanism: portraying one side as good and demonizing the other as evil
4) Armageddon: presenting violence as inevitable, omitting alternatives
5) Focusing on individual acts of violence while avoiding structural causes like poverty, government neglect, and repression
3/ 6) Confusion: focusing only on the conflict arena but not on the forces and factors that influence the violence.
7) Excluding and omitting the bereaved, thus never explaining why there are acts of revenge and spirals of violence.
4/ 8) Failure to explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage itself.
9) Failure to explore the goals of outside interventionists, especially big powers.
10) Failure to explore peace proposals and offer images of peaceful outcomes.
5/ 11) Confusing cease-fires and negotiations with actual peace.
12) Omitting reconciliation: conflicts tend to reemerge if attention is not paid to efforts to heal fractured societies. When news about attempts to resolve conflicts are absent, fatalism is reinforced.
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@patribotics I think the #FinCENFiles prove that FinCEN has done nothing to effectively enforce the money laundering done through shell companies in US real estate for years.
They've actually inhibited investigations by hoarding a lot of this documentation themselves without investigating.
@patribotics Russia compromised the Treasury in 2015. Several whistleblowers were silenced.
So a Transnational Crime Syndicate takes over FinCEN, hopes to install Trump in power and hits the hail-mary.
@patribotics They install their people at the Treasury first, then take over DOJ, and they're laughing.
They employ the "Catch and Kill" strategy.
They use FinCEN to gobble up all the money laundering crimes, become strangely tight with all the records, and just sit on it.
The Azerbaijani Laundromat used a neat little tactic.
They opened accounts in the name of a low-level bank employee, in this case a driver, and transferred more than $1.7 billion into other countries and open shell companies.
The Trump Admin's "Secret Police" tactics are right out of the Authoritarian's playbook.
There are examples of these forces throughout history, but one of the most recent (and cruel) isn't well known in the West:
The Securitate.
Thread.
1/ From 1965 - 1989, Romania was ruled by a brutal dictator named Nicolae Ceaușescu.
He stole millions while people starved, demolished cultural buildings to build a gaudy palace, and maintained control through a cruel secret police force.