The US media and the release of POW Bowe Bergdahl

Click here to access article by Patrick Martin from World Socialist Web Site.

The American media is once again exhibiting its boundless capacity for dispensing propaganda and promoting the most backward and reactionary conceptions. Such is the campaign of vilification directed against Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, released May 31 in Afghanistan in a prisoner exchange with the Taliban.

The depiction of Bergdahl by many mainstream media pundits illustrates a principle that the ruling capitalist class espouses: obedience to their authority is a virtue and those that exhibit it are celebrated as heroes, those that don't are castigated as traitors.

As far as the media apologists for imperialism are concerned, a soldier who is horrified by crimes against humanity and refuses to participate in them is a criminal, while those who obediently carry out atrocities are heroes. It should be recalled that the defense of “just carrying out orders” was flatly repudiated by the Nuremberg Tribunal into the crimes of the Nazis during World War II. Those who would revive it today are paving the way for even greater crimes.