Belarus and Bolivia

By Jerry Kroth

"Information Clearing House" -  The American mainstream media is having a hissy fit of virtue signaling at the ‘appalling’ act of aviation piracy of Belarus’ Lukashenko who forced an aircraft to land so he could search and arrest an opponent of his regime, Roman Protasevich.

He succeeded in doing that, and now Lukashenko must endure daily condemnation from every corner of the EU and mainstream U.S. media.

Strangely, though, we have all become so accustomed to journalism which no longer tells both sides of the story —it is called “advocacy journalism”—that to counter this egregious one-sidedness we should remind ourselves, and especially the snobbish moralists of NPR, CNN, and Washington Post, that the U.S. did the exact same thing.

When Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was flying back from Moscow, there was suspicion that his plane might be carrying the evil Edward Snowden. We forced his plane to land in Austria and searched under every seat, nook, and cranny looking for him.

That was also an act of aviation piracy too, and of the first order, but no comparisons are made, and there are no reminders that we were guilty of exactly the same appalling behavior we accuse Lukashenko of today.

The only difference is Lukashenko seems to have found his nemesis, but we didn’t.

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor Emeritus from Santa Clara University