On November 11, my wife and I were watching DW News out of Berlin. We watch that news outlet along with BBC News to observe the decline of Western civilization, a decline that is crossing the pond from Europe to America.
The opening segment was about Trump’s pledge to begin deporting “migrants” on his first day in office. A guest was introduced as a political commentator from Los Angeles. Wearing 1960s-style glasses, he looked and sounded like a dweeb. His opening statement was that “Children are going to be ripped out of the arms of their mothers.”
Neither the dweeb nor the rest of the segment reported that Trump has been much more nuanced in interviews and has said that deportations will focus first on criminals.
The stench of a double standard permeated the newsroom.
Being sophisticated, openminded, avant-garde, cosmopolitan, and secular, DW and BBC anchors and reporters would never be so narrow-minded, misogynist, patriarchal, or born-again to say that abortions in the 35th week of pregnancy are akin to ripping babies out of the wombs of mothers.
In their world, only the right-wing would say something like that. After all, there are no left wings in their world. In DW and BBC Land, chickens and airplanes come with only right wings. The same for politics. Everyone they disagree with on immigration or other issues is either right-wing, far right-wing, or extreme right-wing.
People and groups are never labeled as left-wing, no matter how autocratic, illiberal, or socialist they might be. That’s because there are no left-wingers in DW and BBC Land, even though communist parties still exist under different names in Europe, even though half of Germany was communist not that long ago, and even though the East German communists built a wall through Berlin to keep citizens from escaping to the West.
Likewise, there are no problems with immigrants in DW and BBC Land, even though there are huge socioeconomic and cultural problems with the influx of Muslims from North Africa and elsewhere, especially those who disdain Western values. According to the standard newsroom script, the problems are inventions of the right.
This script was followed in the earlier coverage of Jews being attacked in Amsterdam. The attackers were labeled as pro-Palestinian, not as Muslim, and no mention was made of their previous antisemitism.
During the coverage, my memory went back to circa 1985, when I was in Amsterdam on business. At the first opportunity, I visited the Anne Frank attic, which at the time didn’t require a reservation and was fully accessible. It was a sobering to imagine what life was like for Jews during the Nazi occupation and to picture German troops on the street and the Gestapo going from door to door.
My interest in this horrible period of history began decades before, when I was in eighth grade and the nuns at my parochial school showed films of the concentration camps being liberated by the allies, complete with scenes of emaciated bodies, the ovens, the gas chambers, and piles of teeth and spectacles. Wondering how humans could inflict such atrocities on other humans, I would go on to read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” when it came out in paperback. I’ve been reading history and philosophy ever since, in searching for the answer.
I’m still searching, but one thing is clear: The left has brutalized and killed as many humans as the right has, but because the left’s evil has been done under the guise of social justice, it has tended to be downplayed by the media.
The lack of balance continues today, with the media downplaying the social, economic and cultural damage wrought by the left. This double standard has caused the right to become more strident and shift further to the right.
Now the unbalanced media is characterizing Trump as a fascist, unaware of their role in his reelection.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
