The Sunday Mail
Big media (the far-reaching, if not over-reaching, global mass communication platforms such as TV, radio, newspapers, et cetera) and Big Tech (being the pervasive social media platforms that now dominate our lives) made us believe that the consequential November 3, 2020 US presidential elections pitting then-incumbent Donald Trump and Joe Biden were tantamount to making a choice between absurdity and reasonableness, decorum and impropriety, civility and obscenity, and, most critically, good and evil.
Trump’s numerous foibles, which often saw him indecorously speaking out of turn, abandoning age-old diplomatic etiquette and crassly airing his controversial views in public, made big media’s agenda of casting him as the world’s most abominable, despicable, dangerous and evil human being effortlessly easy.
Hope you still remember the furore from that January 11, 2018 meeting between Trump and US senators where he nonchalantly referred to Haiti and African countries as “sh*thole” countries. Kikikiki.
It prompted the UN human rights office to describe the comments as “shocking and shameful” and “racist”.
Bishop Lazi knows, as many people do, that Trump was only chided, pilloried and crucified for having the gall to publicly vocalise what many Americans privately whisper in their homes.
He was a man of unrestrained bluster with scant regard for Washington’s stealthy and deceptive cloak-and-dagger politics, but, in the end, he became a victim of the same.
Well, politics is now colourless and poorer without the maverick, who gave the world an unadulterated and non-patronising view that is shorn of the traditional nauseating and condescending diplomatic niceties.
He brought the same razzmatazz to politics as “Captain Fiasco” himself, Phillip Chiyangwa.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that his style of politics was bound to put him on a collision course with an American media clique desperate to portray Washington as an unblemished global leader that holds absolute sway over world affairs.
Every day he was in the White House, media organisations such as CNN (Cable News Network) shamelessly hounded and teared him apart to an extent that the whole charade ultimately became laughable, ludicrous and ridiculous.
In the same way degrading news stories calculated to soil Russia and China’s image now have permanent slots on these channels’ news cycles, so it also was with Donald Trump, who naturally reacted by calling them “fake news”.
His only succour came from channels such as Fox News, whose reach, however, was limited to an American audience.
Suffice to say, his image in the eyes of the world remained shattered and tattered.
Conversely, when Biden secured the nomination to contest as the Democratic Party candidate, his image was burnished, embellished and laundered as the long-awaited hero who would extricate America from the brink and bring back a modicum of decency, dignity, civility and decorum to both the White House and world politics.
And he seemed to fit the bill.
His record as a devout Catholic and decades of political experience put him in good stead compared to a hedonic and “inexperienced” Trump.
The two contrasting stereotypes of Biden and Trump — grounded on the dichotomy of good and evil — were carefully contrived by mainstream traditional media and amplified through new media platforms.
Big, fat lie
But things are rarely what they seem.
As the world is slowly discovering, Joe Biden is not quite the good guy he was made out to be.
We were sold a big, fat lie by a media that is firmly embedded in the US State Department, the foremost institution that advance’s America’s interests abroad.
Except for the April 2018 bombing of Syria after a story concocted by the BBC that alleged President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons on civilians in the town of Douma, Trump did not menacingly wield America’s war machinery to bully perceived adversaries, but he assiduously tried to purse a policy of rapprochement with Washington’s foes such as Kim Jong-un’s North Korea and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Someday a story will be told of how the State Department bureaucrats stood in the way of a Trump White House that was not averse to the idea of lifting sanctions on Zimbabwe.
And, as a man who is not particularly known for his religious fervour, Trump, however, staunchly opposed abortion and even signed an executive order in January 2017 to prohibit federal funding to NGOs that provide abortion or information about them.
His disdain for NATO was quite apparent and at one time threatened to walk away from the military alliance.
His philosophy was fairly simple: Keep oil prices reasonably low and concentrate on rebuilding America.
It is the exact opposite with the Biden presidency.
Currently, we, as everyone in the world, including the US, are smarting from the fallout of NATO’s aggressive expansion in Eastern Europe under the instigation of Washington.
Fuel prices continue rising and, with them, prices of food and other commodities.
We are literally paying the price of the new administration’s misadventures.
Instead of Biden, whom we are told is a devout Christian, actively working for peace and cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, he actually continues to provide funds (including US$40 billion in aid), high-calibre weapons and moral support to literally keep the fire burning in Ukraine, notwithstanding the staggering casualties suffered by Kyiv and the flare-up in global inflation.
Matthew 5:9 tells us: “Blessed are the peacemakers for they will be called children of God.”
But, Bishop Lazarus wants to draw your attention to the current debate on abortion that is tearing America’s society apart and its significance in interpreting the type of administration that sits on the throne in Washington.
You see, in a June 24 ruling, the US Supreme ended the constitutional right to abortion, effectively paving way for individual states to ban the procedure.
Ordinarily, it would be reasonable to think Biden, a Catholic, would support the decision and reasoning made by the justices, but, alas, he continues to insist a woman’s right to abort – regardless of the circumstances – is paramount than the right of the unborn child.
He has since intimated he will soon act to circumvent the recent ruling.
His stance, including the decision to cosy up and jump into bed with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) movement by declaring the just-ended month of June as Pride Month, has not quite endeared him to his church mates.
In his June 6 instalment in the Washington Times, columnist Robert Knight was apoplectic.
“Media and Big Tech promoted Mr Biden as a ‘moderate’ and ‘unifier’, while covering up Mr Biden’s radicalism and shocking pay-for-play scandals involving his son Hunter,” he said, adding: “Pride Month’s creed violates everything this supposedly devout Catholic president is supposed to believe. Pride is an original sin, enabling all others … Mr Biden has raised lots of money from pro-abortion and LGBTQ pressure groups, which insist that children be saturated with LGBTQ materials and assisted by schools to transition to the opposite sex. They call this gender affirming.”
Knight was not done: “Recent surveys indicate growing remorse on the part of many Biden-Harris voters. They need to know they can still leave the ship that is foundering on the wrong side of Isaiah 5:20: ‘Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’”
While the Bishop does not give a damn about sovereign America’s preferences and domestic affairs, he is nevertheless worried about the integrity of its amoral rulers, who seem to be hell-bent on driving the world over the cliff.
This view by Robert Knight lies at the heart of one of the most power teachings by the Catholic Church published through an encyclical by Pope John Paul II on March 25, 1995 titled “Evangelium Vitae” (The Gospel of Life).
In it, the Pope proclaimed: “The moral conscience, both individual and social, is today subjected, also as a result of the penetrating influence of the media, to an extremely serious and mortal danger: that of confusion between good and evil, precisely in relation to the fundamental right to life.
‘‘A large part of contemporary society looks sadly like that humanity which Paul describes in his Letter to the Romans. It is composed “of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth” (1:18): having denied God and believing that they can build the earthly city without him, “they became futile in their thinking” so that “their senseless minds were darkened” (1:21); “claiming to be wise, they became fools” (1:22), carrying out works deserving of death, and “they not only do them but approve those who practise them” (1:32). When conscience, this bright lamp of the soul (cf. Mt 6:22-23), calls “evil good and good evil” (Is 5:20), it is already on the path to the most alarming corruption and the darkest moral blindness.”
Powerful!
Smoke and mirrors
Folks, this succinctly explains what is wrong with the world today, where pervasive media networks, with the tacit approval of Washington, are actively glorifying the war in Ukraine, whose deleterious impact is affecting everyone in the world, including America.
Instead of suing for peace, the world has entered a dangerous phase of re-armament and could possibly be sleepwalking into a major epoch-defining world war.
Well, in this critical phase where the world is seemingly being balkanised into various camps, it is critical to peer through the smokescreen and illusions conjured by contrived narratives in the so-called mainstream global media and know who the bad guys are in this story.
We need to ask ourselves: Who gave the West, despite its chequered past of centuries of buying and selling human beings and stealing minerals and other resources in Africa, the moral right to lecture us, its victims, on human rights and property rights?
Should we believe in Western media when it is so blatantly prejudiced to the extent that it cannot distinguish between good and evil, truth and lies.
Africa needs to be woke and question the misleading narratives of the West which are daily churned out through its multiple media channels and platforms.
Doing so will help it make informed political and economic choices.
We, however, know who the bad guys are in this story.
Bishop out!
