On February 25, Elon Musk tweeted, “That election was arguably dodgy, but no question that there was indeed a coup.” By “That election,” he was referring to Viktor Yanukovych’s having won the Presidency of Ukraine in an election about which even the British Guardian newspaper had headlined on 8 February 2010, “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair,” and it made clear that even Western international observers in Ukraine were testifying to the authenticity of that electoral win by Yanukovych: “Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said there were no indications of serious fraud and described the vote as an ‘impressive display’ of democracy.” However, Elon Musk, without citing any evidence, was now saying otherwise: that Yanukovych’s win had been “arguably dodgy” — and (despite that tweet) he provided no argument at all to back up that ‘arguably’ allegation.
It is foolish to cite tweets that have no links to any evidence, as being evidence for anything other than the tweeter had made that assertion. As a general rule, tweets are the least-reliable source of information. Certainly Musk’s tweet was. However, he also said there that there was “no question that there was indeed a coup.” Anyone who has at all followed the evidence on that matter knows that it unquestionably was a coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014; and even the head of the “private-CIA” firm Stratfor said on 19 December 2014 that the overthrow of Yanukovych that had occurred then was “the most blatant coup in history.” It was that, because the evidence that it was is not only this smoking gun that it was a U.S. coup, but because there was plenty more of high quality evidence and all of it showed the same thing: it was a coup by (or “on behalf of”) the Obama Administration. (Obama and his team, and all ‘allied’ countries, however, and all of the Western news-media, called it instead a ‘democratic revolution’. This is George Orwell’s 1984 made real. It’s not real history, but real deceit.)
The fools who follow Musk’s opinions should know that he himself thinks that coups are just fine: when Elon Musk received on 24 July 2020 a tweet from an “Armani” saying, “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there [for Tesla cars’ batteries].” Later that day, Musk replied:
He likes coups that profit himself personally, but apparently there are some coups that he disfavors — and he doesn’t ever explain (or at least not honestly) why. Maybe, for twitter-followers, “why” just isn’t an interesting question? (Maybe that’s why they use social media — instead of articles like this, that link to their primary sources — to ‘know’ what’s ‘going on’ in ‘the news’?)
Musk’s stupid tweet about Ukraine was likewise in response to something that one of his followers had tweeted: He was responding to one of his twitter followers, “KanekoaTheGreat” having tweetedquoting Professor John Mearsheimer who said in the September/October 2014 issue of America’s most prestigious — and strongly pro-U.S.-empire or “neoconservative” or pro-Military-Industrial-Complex — Foreign Affairs magazine, “For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’—was the final straw.” Ultimately, that’s what Musk was responding to — not the evidence, but instead the opinion there, in that overwhelmingly pro-U.S.-coups and empire magazine, from (as it turns out) a professor who was arguing that the coup had been merely (and only) a mistake:
On February 17, under the headline “John Mearsheimer’s Misrepresentations In Order To Be Allowed Space On U.S. Propaganda-Media (i.e., U.S. ‘News’-Media),” I had pointed out numerous distortions of the historical record regarding that coup — such as his alleging it to have been due to a “flawed view” (not a vicious, or even just a “false” view, but merely “flawed”. He doesn’t so much as hint in what way “flawed”) including “such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy,” which “went awry in Ukraine [and, again, he doesn’t hint at in what way ‘awry’],” and on and on — as-if it weren’t what it actually was: which was the U.S. Government’s bipartisan neoconservative obsession to trap Russia’s Government, to checkmate it into its being forced to yield, finally and inexorably, to the control by the U.S. Government. That’s imperialism — and there wasn’t a word about it — except one passing reference, which was 180 degrees in the false direction: against actually the victim-country, not against the aggressor:
In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”
And that distractive and deceptive reference is to Russia’s ‘imperialism’, NOT to America’s own authentic hyper-imperialism that Russia is now responding to (and which imperialism entails a military budget that now (including what’s hidden in non-‘Defense’-Department agencies but is still for military purposes) is half of the entire world’s military spending, and it pays for 900 foreign military bases and much more that is counterproductive if it has any real impact at all on protecting U.S. national security. (It’s not “the Defense Department”; it is “the Aggression Department.”)
This is the hidden reality: and neither Musk nor Mearsheimer, nor any other mouthpiece of the U.S. Establishment or the “Deep State” lets its audience in on it — and on the evidence that this is the reality.
The U.S. coup against and that grabbed Ukraine was a very intentional, and very evil — not at all unintentional or ‘by mistake’ — U.S. coup, and Putin is being villainized in U.S.-and-allied media for finally responding to it in Russia’s case. Not only was it “a coup” but it was a U.S. coup, and it was by careful and evil design, no mere (nor Mearsheimer) ‘error’.
This is — on steroids — the 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse: Ukraine is only a 300-mile or five-minute missile-flying-time distance away from the Kremlin and decapitation of Russia’s ability to fire-off its retaliatory weapons (within less than five minutes) against a U.S. blitz-attack. Russia needs to prevent that.
“The West” — including all of NATO — are 100% the aggressors in this matter. And that fact is unmentionable in U.S.-and-allied media.
The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working: we think we *look* stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually *become* weaker vs. China.
Perhaps in foreign affairs, while the Democrats (liberal fascists) will be campaigning for war against Russia to precede war against China, the Republicans (conservative fascists) will be campaigning for war against China to precede war against Russia. It’ll be a contest about which ‘enemy’ to hate first. Either way, the owners of mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil will be beaming. They’re the real constituency in this ‘democracy’.
It’s like: Will the flavor be chocolate, or will it be vanilla? Either way, it’ll be loaded with sugar, artificial flavoring, and artificial coloring, and will fatten you, and rot your teeth just the same, no matter how different the taste is. And those are the only two ‘choices’. That’s all the billionaires are offering, in the political market. Truth isn’t anywhere on the menu, from either Party.
In an article published last week titled “US working with ‘Five Eyes’ nations, Japan on information warfare,” a publication on military intelligence and communications technology called C4ISRNET reports that the US and its allies are collaborating “to share and sharpen information-warfare techniques in the Indo-Pacific” with the goal of “countering” the “increasingly aggressive China.”
Here’s an excerpt:
Dialogues and exchanges of best practices are ongoing with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and other countries including Japan, according to Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, commander of Naval Information Forces.
“I want to say we have at least a dozen countries or so that are either establishing information warfare programs, or are interested in partnering further in the information warfare realm,” she said Feb. 15 at the West 2023 conference in San Diego. “We are leaning in there, we are focused.”
Japan, specifically, has expressed significant interest in information warfare, “in a really positive way,” Aeschbach told C4ISRNET. Japan and Australia, among others, are considered critical U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, a region national security officials are invested in as they seek to counter an increasingly aggressive China.
Libertarian Institute’s Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman have a good write-up on this latest revelation in which they explain that information warfare is “a broad swath of military operations a country can use to disrupt another” which “can include spreading disinformation or preventing the spread of information.”
As Anzalone and Freeman note, one significant recent instance of the US government’s acknowledged use of information warfare was when US officials told NBC News that the US government has been deliberately circulating unsubstantiated information to western news media “as part of an information war against Russia.”
Which is to say, they lied. When you do things like telling New York Times reporters that “Russia asked China to give it military equipment and support for the war in Ukraine after President Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion last month,” only to have NBC report that you knew this claim “lacked hard evidence,” you lied. You used your country’s mass media institutions to circulate disinformation.
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US Officials Admit They're Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia
"And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to."https://t.co/mYBJ4kQhk8
Which is of course standard operating procedure for the US empire; the mass media have always been propaganda institutions used to manufacture consent for the economic and geopolitical status quo upon which the media-owning class has built its empire. Propaganda is nothing new, including propaganda against China. The difference now is that empire managers are getting increasingly comfortable with publicly acknowledging this fact, probably because the notion that the west needs to fight its own “information war” against its enemies has been gaining increasingly widespread traction since 2016.
And as I keep reiterating, the bizarre thing about this belief is that the propaganda from empire-targeted governments has virtually zero existence in the western world, while western propaganda dominates our information ecosystem. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according to Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.
So we can expect to see a multinational coordinated propaganda campaign against China, which could easily eclipse the anti-China propaganda campaign we’ve seen thus far, and could easily end up making the one against Russia look like child’s play.
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They're Not Worried About "Russian Influence", They're Worried About Dissent
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda.https://t.co/qf10kuPteV
It should infuriate everyone that our rulers are now flagrantly admitting that they manipulate our information environment to advance their own strategic interests. The only reason it doesn’t is because westerners are already so propagandized to the gills that the notion that our rulers should lie to us for our own good has gained so much traction that the empire can now openly imprison journalists for trying to tell us the truth.
In writing this practice is called “lampshading”, where you defuse any objection your audience might have to a glaring plot hole in your narrative by simply acknowledging that it’s there and then moving on. In this case the audience is every news-consuming person in the western world, and the narrative is the story the west has about itself.
Everything the western empire accuses its enemies of doing, it itself does far more egregiously. Westerners think of people in China as brainwashed victims of propaganda and censorship living in a power-serving homogenized information bubble, but that’s exactly what’s happening in our own society. And what’s worse, most westerners don’t even know it. And what’s even worse, they have the temerity to feel self-righteous about what free-thinking and free-speaking individualists they are compared to people in China.
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On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning:
‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’
This was in response to the news that British supermarkets are rationing fresh produce, including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Rationing could last weeks. The shortages were caused by ‘poor weather’, as the Guardian put it, in southern Europe and north Africa. In fact, in June and July 2022, extreme heatwaves caused temperatures to climb above 40 degrees Celsius in places and broke many long-standing records. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record. In North Africa, Tunisia endured a heatwave and fires that damaged the country’s grain crop. On 13 July 2022, in the capital city of Tunis, the temperature reached 48 degrees Celsius, breaking a 40-year record.
As well as harvest losses in southern Europe and north Africa last year, there has been a reduction in UK salad produce after field crops were badly damaged by frost before Christmas. Food supply problems have been compounded by the rising energy costs of growing plants in heated greenhouses.
Although there was some media coverage of fresh produce rationing by supermarkets, including on the front pages, there was little more than passing mention of the systemic connection to the climate crisis. And, par for the course, no headlines or in-depth analysis of the urgent need to shift course from the current path of corporate-driven destruction. Nothing about the very real risk that we are already undergoing the collapse of modern civilisation.
It was symptomatic, once again, of the deeply propagandised society in which we live.
In our previous media alert, we noted the silence across virtually the whole of the state-corporate media in response to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh’s report that the US blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines delivering cheap gas from Russia to Europe.
In a public debate, the renowned US economist Jeffrey Sachs said that:
‘The Swedes went in to clean up the debris [following the explosive destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines] and said, “We cannot share our findings with Germany because of national security” […]. How could Sweden not share its findings with Germany and Denmark? But their job was to clean up so nobody else could investigate either.’
This two-minute clip is extraordinary (as is the full 8-minute video). But the lack of ‘mainstream’ reporting? It is as if the whole of journalism has just…vanished.
Sachs said that he spoke with ‘a leading reporter of one of our leading papers’ whom he has known for forty years. Sachs told his friend that he believed the US carried out the attack on Nord Stream. The reporter replied, ‘Of course the US did it.’
Sachs responded, ‘Why doesn’t your paper say so?’
The reporter blamed his editors. ‘It’s hard; it’s complicated.’
Sachs continued:
‘When I was young, I used to read your newspaper, because you went after Nixon and Watergate, and because you published the Pentagon Papers.’
The reporter replied: ‘Yes, but that paper is dead.’
In fact, one might as well say that all the ‘leading papers’ are dead.
The function of what passes for ‘journalism’ is ever more clear: to propagandise the population to allow ‘national interests’ to determine foreign and domestic policy. These ‘national interests’ are the billionaire class that own the country, and the political, military and intelligence forces that run the country.
They are still terrified of even the prospect of a leftward shift in society, following the near-success of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour in the 2017 General Election. That is why it is so important for establishment stooge Sir Keir Starmer to be promoted across the permissible ‘spectrum’ of news and opinion as the next safe pair of hands to maintain the status quo of power and a monarch-supporting establishment. The Guardian now has a permanent section on its opinion page titled: ‘Starmer’s path to power’.
It is worth highlighting the insidious role played by Starmer, when head of the Crown Prosecution Service, in the persecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, as John Pilger reminded viewers in a recent interview:
‘Starmer’s CPS deliberately kept Julian in this country when the Swedes were saying, “That’s it. We’ve had enough.” […] it was Starmer’s CPS that kept it going [the case against Assange.]’
Starmer has now said that Corbyn cannot stand as a Labour candidate in the next election. Indeed, he has essentially said that the left is no longer welcome in the Labour Party:
‘If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave.’
As Financial Times journalist Stephen Smith pointed out on Twitter:
‘It’s amazing how Labour have calculated they will never need these voters, or all the people these voters could influence in the future’.
The liberal media are happy with this state of affairs. Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and deputy opinion editor at the Guardian, published an opinion piece last Sunday under the title, ‘Keir Starmer was right to exile Corbyn. Labour has a duty to voters, not rebellious members’. It would take an entire media alert to go through her column, line by line, to point out all the egregious distortions and deceptions.
In one sense, it was remarkable that the Observer would publish a piece so riddled with untruths and distortions. That it was written by the paper’s chief leader writer is even more astonishing. But, in fact, it is not remarkable at all. This abysmal low standard – a babbling brook of bullshit, to quote Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David – is entirely predictable from the Observer/Guardian stable of establishment ‘journalism’.
This statement alone was appalling:
‘Corbyn has never apologised for the role he played in the institutional antisemitism that characterised the party under his leadership, including interference in the complaints process by his own staff…’
This was cynical fiction. There was no ‘institutional antisemitism’ under Corbyn. As for ‘interference in the complaints process’, the Al Jazeera‘Labour Files’ series blew a hole through this narrative. As the series showed, Corbyn had been stymied by the party’s central bureaucracy which resisted the leftward shift his victory had initiated when elected as Labour leader in 2015. When he was finally able to have Labour general secretary Iain McNicol (now Baron McNicol of West Kilbride) replaced by Corbyn ally Jennie Formby in 2018, the painfully slow processing of disciplinary cases on antisemitism came to light. It was swiftly improved under Corbyn. The Observer’s leader writer is continuing to use the same debunked nonsense which the media used then to attack Corbyn.
Political writer Simon Maginn has exposed ten fraudulent tropes of the supposed ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ that are constantly recycled to this day. For instance, Guardian columnist Rafael Behr indulged in a disgusting live attack on Corbyn, and the left, on the BBC Politics Live show earlier this week. Under Corbyn, Behr claimed, Labour ‘became infested with anti-Jewish racism’; he was ‘a magnet for anti-semitism’. This was utterly false. And this is a regular, high-profile columnist from a supposedly progressive newspaper!
As the composer and musician Matt Scott pointed out on Twitter:
‘Antisemitism levels went down under Jeremy Corbyn & were lower than in the general public by all known evidence.’
It was such an appalling diatribe from Behr, that if the BBC had any standards at all, that would have been his last appearance.
As Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK, noted:
‘The Labour “antisemitism crisis” propaganda campaign only stayed robust because critical analysis of the campaign – and its pushers – was locked out of the mainstream media.’
‘It was critical the Guardian’s left-wing columnists either joined in the campaign, like Owen Jones, or took an oath of silence, like George Monbiot. That way anyone telling the truth about it was restricted to independent media and easily dismissed as a “crank” or “antisemite”.’
Monbiot was hardly ‘silent’. In 2018, for example, he tweeted:
‘It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone [Guardian features writer Simon Hattenstone] is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.’
Monbiot tweeted this over a screen grab of Hattenstone’s Guardian article titled:
‘I gave Corbyn the benefit of the doubt on antisemitism. I can’t any more.’
It could hardly have been more damning.
Self-Awareness In Short Supply
The current fever pitch of propaganda about Ukraine and Russia, now surely far surpassing that which preceded and followed the West’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, is all the more galling because we are supposed to swallow the notion that we live in a propaganda-free society. Propaganda, we are told, is the preserve of the Official Enemy (insert Russia/China/North Korea/Iran/Venezuela/etc, as required). We (the ‘civilised’ West, creator of universal human rights, moral values and true democracy, etc) have responsible, fair and informative media.
Yes, of course, it is grudgingly admitted, there’s the tabloid press filled with tittle-tattle, fluff, tawdry scandals and other diversionary nonsense. But, we have ‘quality’ newspapers and broadcast media, such as the Times, the Independent, the Guardian and Channel 4 News. Heck, we have BBC News: the world’s ‘most trusted’ international news organisation (as they keep reminding us).
But we could easily fill pages daily with examples of BBC News propaganda (quite apart from the endless omissions that are a fundamental feature of BBC News). Choosing a ‘winner’ each day would be tough. But the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg is often a serious contender. Reporting recently from the Russian city of Belgorod, just 40km north of the border with Ukraine, he observed that: ‘Belgorod locals live in fear but won’t blame Putin’.
He wrote:
‘In addition to the slogans on the street, there’s also the propaganda on Russian state TV. From morning till night news bulletins and talk shows assure viewers that Russia is in the right; that Ukraine and the West are the aggressors and that in this conflict the very future of Russia is at stake.’
Adding: ‘The messaging works.’
As an example, Rosenberg cited a local woman, Olga:
‘She accepts the official view – the version of events that much of the world dismisses as the Kremlin’s alternative reality.’
The lack of self-awareness by Rosenberg – ‘the messaging works’ – is standard for a prominent journalist at the news organisation that has been pumping out state propaganda since its inception under Lord Reith.
The serial dearth of news reporting and analysis that could offer some semblance of counterbalance to the Nato view of events in Ukraine is a damning indictment of BBC News and the rest of the national media.
Perhaps, for many in the media and political circles, there is a genuine fear of challenging official doctrine lest one be smeared as a ‘Putin apologist’. It is a favoured, shameful tactic of Guardian columnist George Monbiot, for example, who has done an excellent job of trashing his own reputation.
‘There is a left – the majority – that’s principled and consistent in denouncing all imperialist war. And there’s another left, represented by Roger Waters, John Pilger, Media Lens etc, that denounces Western wars of aggression but makes excuses for Russian wars of aggression.’
‘Fake! We denounce both Western and Russian wars of aggression. Our media alert, 4 March 2022:
‘”Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq.”’
We asked Monbiot to explain how repeatedly denouncing Putin’s war of aggression was the same thing as making ‘excuses for Russian wars of aggression’. One of the Guardian’s highest-profile columnists then spent the morning trawling through our Twitter history until he eventually found an example of us retweeting someone who described Russia’s invasion as ‘provoked’. Monbiot considered this an example of us making ‘excuses’ for Putin. We cited Chomsky:
‘They know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.’
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summed up his and our position exactly:
‘This really shouldn’t need stating. I focus on the West’s crimes, provocations and distortions not because I’m a Saddam, Assad, Putin apologist. I do so because I’m trying to fill in knowledge gaps for *western audiences* starved of critical information by western corporate media.
‘You don’t need more western propaganda from me. Your eyes and ears are stuffed with it. You need to hear other sides, and missing information, to be able to judge whether what you’re being told by the establishment media is true or propaganda.
‘Not least, you need that counter-information to judge whether the state-corporate media have a collective agenda – and whether that agenda is about empowering you against the establishment, or about empowering the establishment against you.’
What is so remarkable about Monbiot’s relentless attacks on us is that he initially understood exactly what we were trying to do and why. In February 2005, he emailed us:
‘I know we’ve had disagreements in the past, but I wanted to send you a note of appreciation for your work. Your persistence seems to be paying off: it’s clear that many of the country’s most prominent journalists are aware of Medialens, read your bulletins and, perhaps, are beginning to feel the pressure. If, as I think you have, you have begun to force people working for newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right, and worry about being held to account for the untruths they disseminate, then you have already performed a major service to democracy. I feel you have begun to open up a public debate on media bias, which has been a closed book in the United Kingdom for a long time. As you would be the first to point out, this does not solve the problem of the corporate control of the media, but it does sow embarrasment [sic] in the ranks of the enemy, while reminding your readers of the need to seek alternative sources of information.
‘Your columns in the New Statesman have been effective in reaching a wider readership, and I’m glad the Guardian gave you a platform: have you tried to persuade the BBC to let you on? I’m thinking in particular of Radio 4’s programme The Message.
‘With my best wishes, George Monbiot’ (Monbiot, email to Media Lens, 2 February 2005)
But here’s the problem: our ethical approach and rationale were exactly the same in 2005 as they are in 2023. How can Monbiot not understand now what he understood so clearly then: that we are indeed trying to persuade ‘newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right’, to hold them accountable ‘for the untruths they disseminate’? Our work has nothing whatever to do with ‘apologising’ for tyranny. So, who changed: us or Monbiot?
The Purple Prose Of BBC News
Two weeks ago, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky came to London to give a speech pleading for fighter jets, to an adoring audience of the political and media establishment in Westminster Hall. BBC News waxed lyrical:
‘The 900-year-old medieval hall was bathed in sunlight from its vast stained glass windows, as MPs, peers, members of the clergy, reporters and assorted dignitaries assembled in an atmosphere of hushed anticipation.’
Labour’s Stephen Doughty, a member of the all-party Ukraine group, was ‘among those left with a sense of awe’. He said of Zelensky:
‘He’s the real deal. You don’t get many leaders quite like that in the world.’
At the end of his speech, Zelensky gave a ‘Churchillian “V for victory” sign’ as the Ukrainian national anthem played in the background. That, reported the BBC, ‘was the most powerful moment for’ Doughty, particularly:
‘as the stained glass windows that bathed the whole occasion in light are a memorial to the staff and members of both houses of Parliament who died in the Second World War.’
Doughty added: ‘The symbolism of that is incalculable.’
BBC impartiality was truly out the window – stained glass or otherwise – when a BBC reporter proclaimed to Zelensky: ‘Greetings, Mr. President, I would really like to hug you.’
It was a propaganda show that would be mocked mercilessly here if something similar happened in Russia.
Earlier this week, US president Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Ukraine before heading on to Poland. His speeches were reported diligently and respectfully by Western media. Meanwhile, as the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian people. A live BBC News page emphasised the key points for the BBC audience:
‘Putin suspends key US nuclear arms deal in bitter speech against West’
‘Putin rages against West’
And: ‘[Putin] goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Washington’
Can you imagine BBC News ever describing in similar terms a speech given by a US president or British prime minister? ‘Biden rages against Russia’
Or: ‘Biden goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Moscow’
Media analyst Alan MacLeod drew attention in a powerful Twitter thread to the glaring contrast between: ‘When they do it vs. when we do it.’
For example, the Time double issue of 14/21 March 2022 had a cover depicting a Russian tank invading Ukraine with the title: ‘The Return of History: How Putin Shattered Europe’s Dreams’
By contrast, when the Time cover of 11 September 1995 depicted a huge explosion as Nato bombed Serbs in Bosnia, the title was: ‘Bringing the Serbs to Heel: A Massive Bombing Attack Opens the Door to Peace’
This recalls Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bizarre comment at the World Economic Forum that ‘weapons are the way to peace’.
Truly, we are living in an Orwellian era.
MacLeod also highlighted the title of a piece by Times columnist David Aaronovitch from 28 April, 2022: ‘Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul’
By contrast, on 30 November 2017, the Times ran an opinion piece by Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest and theologian, titled: ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’
And on and on.
In a brilliant ten-minute presentation by film director Ken Loach, he said:
‘The mass media are our enemy – they’ve declared war, and we know whose interests they represent.’
Finally, perhaps, the left is beginning to understand the role of the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the ‘MSM’ in maintaining the established system of power in the UK, including its endless support for war.
Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article
Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propagandathinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of propaganda by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Because this article is rhetoric and not propaganda, I will take my chances, identifying thirteen commandments of propaganda.
In my last article, Speaking with Forked Tongues, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behavior while censoring, hiding, restricting distorting and exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks.
A little less than two years ago I wrote an article called Jacques Ellul: Controversies in Propaganda. The purpose of this article is to explicate the theory of propaganda of Brian Anse Patrick in The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. Secondly and briefly, it will be to compare his theory to that of Ellul.
Most Provocative Points of Ellul’s Propaganda Theory
Unlike other theorists, Ellul argued that propaganda served boththe upper classes and the lower classes for different reasons.
Unlike other theorists, he understood propaganda as inevitable in modern societies. There is no getting around this.
Unlike most other theorists, he saw masses of people as complicit in their own subordination. He saw them neither as victims of circumstance nor as heroic masses.
He distinguished between hard and fast political propagandaand soft and slow sociological He called political propaganda “agitation”. Education is not outside propaganda. It is part of sociological propaganda.
He identified two techniques of propagandizing the masses. The first kind is mithridatizationwhich acts like a sedative and sensibilization which is about riling people up.
Unlike most other theorists of propaganda, Ellul followed Joseph Goebbels and said that the best propaganda is based on facts.It becomes propaganda with the interpretation of facts. Propaganda based on lies is a sign of weakness.
Most propaganda theorists thought the working class was most impacted by propaganda. Ellul argued that it is the upper-middle classes that create the propaganda and are most likely to believe it.
Ellul distinguished horizontal propaganda,which was made inside the group, from vertical propaganda, which uses centralized power. An example of horizontal propaganda was the re-educational groups of Yankee soldiers organized by the Chinese communists during Yankee imprisonment.
For Ellul, propaganda does not come from the ruling class, but from the upper-middle class.
Industrialist capitalist “democracies” need propagandabecause they depend on public opinion, which is disorganized. It requires propaganda to compete with socialist societies.
Unlike other theorists, Ellul makes a distinction between ideology and myth and argues that myth is more powerful.
His concept of crystallization claims that the individual has latent drives and stereotypes which are vague (based on the work of Karen Horney), and they then become the foundation of propaganda.
Unlike other schools of propaganda, Ellul argues that quantitative study of propaganda isn’t effective. One cannot tell how many people are reached and how effective white vs black propaganda is. At what point do you say it failed? At what point does the payoff justify the cost?
According to Ellul, psychological propaganda in foreign countries does not work. Propagandists are too ignorant of the attitudes, centers of interest, presuppositions and suspicions of the foreign population.
Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda
Control the information flow by becoming a source or distributor of information
This includes creating news events, press releases, town hall meetings, scientific reports, op-ed pieces, direct mail appeals, talk show appearances, books, think tanks and commissions. It means creating novelties and hiring screen writers for movies. Many ideas are testing out the public by creating focus groups to see how people respond. This was shown in Parts I and II of Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self. Another technique was in the creating of Gallup polls which surveyed the opinions of Mordor’s citizens about sociological and political hot topics to see what floats and what doesn’t.
Use black and white absolutes
This was included in my previous article Speaking in Tongues in that it used loaded language, specifically virtue and vice words. Propaganda does not seem to work well when there seem to exist only many shades of gray. It is successful when it paints in broad, bold brushstrokes complicated social reality into a melodramatic, dichotomous struggle between good guys and bad guys. Nazi’s terms such as Jewish “bacillus” (parasites) to define the Jews helped the extermination process. Once the Jews were officially defined as the “parasitic nation of Judea” it became easier to do horrible things to them. The same is true with what was done to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. Conspiracy theories are perfect frameworks for black and white thinking.
Expect that as Mordor revs up its propaganda machine against China, Chinese images will appear, just like the image at the beginning of this article. Here the Chinese are wallowing in opium dens making them seem like a decadent culture. What is absent from the propaganda poster is the story of how the British brought opium to China to begin with.
Crafting the message so it resonates with what is already in people’s heads in terms of their values and beliefs
One of the two most common misunderstandings about propaganda is that propagandists want to introduce something new. Propagandists cannot afford to risk time, effort and resources on messages that might not fly. They need to work with the beliefs and commitments that people already have and just interpret the meaning differently. All a propagandist has to do to create negative propaganda is use propaganda which violates these values in order to drum up hostility among the natives against their supposed enemy. In psychological warfare, predictably, the CIA trots out its tired old list of atrocity stories of the enemy – eating babies, various betrayals to family and any of the violations of evolutionary psychology to work people up into supporting the latest war.
Neither is it true that propaganda is filled with lies. It is true that black propaganda does this, but the use of black propaganda is a sign that propaganda’s messages come out of weakness rather than strength. Following Goebbels, Patrick says propaganda must be factual. It in the interpretation of the facts that propaganda makes its move. In addition to facts, there must be something inexorable about the interpretation as if it could not be any other way. It also must seem necessary, as if any other interpretation would lead to a disaster. Finally, the message must seem to have legitimacy, with the weight of the authorities and the ages behind it.
Address psychological, spiritual and social needs of the population
Over two thousand years ago Patrick points out, Aristotle identified what made people happy. He included security, the independent enjoyment of goods, health, wealth, friendship, good children, good birth and pleasant old age. Patrick says these are the same values American politicians draw from. The differences between people in different cultures is the order of these values, not the values themselves. In addition, what is important to people will draw their attention. Lastly, the biological need for food, sex and economic survival is sure to draw people out.
Today Patrick says modern mass society the media person is a strange hybrid of neurotic insecurity and solipsistic egomania. A mass individual is socialized to think himself unique and inviolable in his opinion and in his voting. Propaganda must appeal to this.
Propaganda must appeal to the individual’s identity, his ego, his power and his efficacy. The person must feel like he belongs somewhere, that he is wanted and useful. Lastly, propaganda must give the individual a sense of understanding the world, where it is going along with addressing the political anxiety that develops because of an absence of reassurance about direction. It also helps for the propaganda to have the appearance of hidden underground knowledge that is revealed only to superior beings.
Censoring stories or contrary information
Even if you control the content and sources of information, even if you hammer your message into dualistic opposites and even if you appeal to the beliefs and values of the audience, the message of propaganda will be weakened if the beliefs, values, movements, parties and programs of its opposition are allowed to be aired publicly. Propaganda must actively suppress its opposition. Patrick’s most blatant example of this is Britain’s cutting the transatlantic cable from Germany during the World War I. A weaker version of this is to make sure that stories that run against propaganda never get to the public through the press. For over two decades an organization called Project Censoredcomes out with a book which, among other things, contains 25 of the top censored stories every year. In the 2022 edition, here are some of the stories:
Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
Journalists investigating the Financial Crimes Threatened by Elites
Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Worker Rights
Google’s Union-Busting Methods Revealed
Police Use of Dogs as Instruments of Violence Targets People of Color
Corporate Media Sideline Health Experts during Pandemic
US Factory Farming a Breeding Ground for Next Pandemic
New Wave of Independent News Sources Demonized by Google-Owned You Tube
Conservative Christian Groups Spend Globally to Promote Anti-LGBTQ Campaigns
Use of group pressure to horizontally shape beliefs and behaviors
Many, many people imagine propaganda works like the spokes of a wheel. In the center is the propagandist sending out information to separate the spokes. The relationship between the spokes has nothing to do with propaganda. But Patrick rightly claims horizontal propaganda (relationships between groups) is perhaps the most effective way yet of sustaining a propaganda message. It extends, supplements and complements centralized, authoritative bureaucratic propaganda. In the case of the Milgram experiment, the “teachers” obeyed the authorities not just because the authorities seemed legitimate, but because other members of the group were also shocking people. Maoist Chinese communists relied on hammering their propaganda in a centralized way. But they also wisely held writing contests for groups in which the winner of the essay would be the one that most successfully denounced US imperialism. These essays were then discussed in a groupsetting where the content of the essays reinforced the propaganda of the communists. In a text I used to use in teaching my Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric class, the author pointed out that when Yankee soldiers were asked why they stuck out horrendous situations, it wasn’t because of obedience to their officers and the propaganda of patriotism. It was because they didn’t want to let their comrades down.
In cults, the central propaganda comes from the cult leader. But the cult leader by themselves is not strong enough to break the bond between the recruit and their family and friends. However, the propaganda is sustained by fellow cult members, especially when they are living together. The pressure of horizontal propaganda has often been strong enough to break the loyalty of the recruit to their own family. This is why families hire cult counselors to intervene to get their children out of the cult.
A less heavy-headed approach can be seen in AA groups. The centralized propaganda of Alcoholics Anonymous are the twelve steps. But when a person declares that they are ready to graduate from AA, even the best sponsor will not be as successful in pressuring the person leaving to stay as much as having to face the group at one of their meetings. Similar processes are in place in the horizontal sustaining of propaganda in DARE and in Amway groups.
When propagandists bombard a mass population, they never know how it will be perceived. There will always be people who are apathetic, recalcitrant or openly rebellious and are invisible to the vertical propagandists. However, once propaganda becomes horizontalized, groups have a far better record of winning the recruit to their side and for marginalizing or driving out deviants.
Propagandists also have ways of controlling groups by spouting an ideology that seems to be the opposite of the propagandists’ attempts at control. Some of these include “Team” management; “Democratization” of the workplace; “quality” circles; “shared” governance. Once groups have begun implementing the ideology, it only becomes stronger and more difficult for people to recognize that team management hides the old authority; that democracy in the workplace is still controlled by managers; quality circles rarely result in higher pay for workers and shared governance still has the same bosses at the top. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Cognitively penetrate and stick
How does the propagandist get attention in an age of attention deficit? How do they sustain the attention once it has been noticed? Two means of being noticed are novelty and humor. In the case of humor, from what I am told, there are an extraordinary number commercials during the Superbowl which are dominated by humor. A person is more likely to remember a brand when a commercial made them laugh.
In order to sustain a person’s attention, the propagandist has to compete with many other propagandists from the fields of advertising, politics, economics and sports. An essential strategy is to burrow a hole into the consciousness by repeatingthe message. In addition, these messages must be simple and easy to understand, filled with slogans and with accompanying images. Popular music is a great example. I still remember the lyrics of rock and roll songs from 50 years ago because the verses were repeated, the music was simple (think of Motown) and there were the accompanying images of the musicians. For two thousand years the discipline of rhetoric has studied the ways in which people can have their minds and actions changed. Rhetorical devices – metaphors, acronyms, alliteration, and rhyme – make language memorable, dramatic and visual.
Personalize events
Many years ago, I worked as a counselor for an organization called Men Overcoming Violence. It was a 40-week program for men who were violent with their partners. Our job was to teach them better communication skills. Periodically we would hire outside speakers to give talks for the public that was related to our work. One time we had two presenters, each taking the opposite stance about the extent that violence was inevitable in men. The first presenter approached the problem statistically. He presented research from Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He also presented cross-cultural research claiming that men were nine times more likely to be violent than women. The second presenter took the case study approach. They brought up a man who had successfully graduated from our program. He told the audience the story of how he was once violent with his wife, but thanks to our program he had changed. Then he called on the man’s wife who testified about how much he had changed. There was not a dry eye in the house. After the two talks we asked the audience via secret ballot whether they thought men could ever be no more violent than woman. Guess who won? The personal story won out over the statistics.
When we hear of mass shootings in the news are we presented with statistics on how many the police have killed in the course of the year? No. We are presented with the personal stories of either the victim or the slayer. Patrick points out that when a lawyer defends a multiple slayer to the jury, he is likely to lead with “my client made a mistake”. Everyone makes mistakes, right? It could have been you. Switching to cinema, whatever the movie you’re watching, you can be sure part of the trailer line will be “one man’s quest…to overcome adversity”. Heroes and villains – not sociology – dominate the popular imagination. What propagandists fear most is masses of people responding against the propagandists in a collective manner. In making the problem personal and psychological, collective responses are less likely.
Bureaucratize events
The flip side of personalizing events is to bureaucratize them, that is to convey the message that there is nothing that can be done to combat the propaganda. It removes the question of responsibility. To speak in a bureaucratic passive voice depersonalizes decisions which are ugly, stupid and arbitrary. Political scientist Edelman says the main function of modern mass political language is to sharpen the pointless to show some interest and blunt the too sharply pointed.
In their book Bureaucratic Propaganda, David Altheide and John Johnson say that bureaucratic propaganda is used in how newsrooms use records; how tv ratings are constructed and interpreted and how religious movements count souls. Bureaucratic propaganda also includes keeping a transmission of records about what an organization does, how the police magnify or minimize its reports and how the military counts its casualties. Patrick points out:
Military censors or media relations personnel avoid news images that show the caskets for the people on their side of the conflict, especially in quantity. In the first World War, despite nearly a million United Kingdom military dead, no British newspaper reputedly even showed a photography of a dead British soldier. Seeing actual bodies shocks and reduces morale. (148)
In the political context, with competition for scarce funds, prestige and continued political support make records creation a self-serving activity. The capitalist state fudges rate of unemployment, the gross national product, the rate of inflation and the number of Covid cases to reassure the public that it has everything under control.
With bureaucratic propaganda the public gets what Goffman called the “front” part of the organization and never the back side. Unlike traditional propaganda, bureaucratic propaganda does not try to reinforce deeply held beliefs, but instead the legitimacy of an existing organization through painting a contrived, managed and decontextualized picture. The appeal of bureaucratic propaganda is not to economic, political or advertising forces, but to the scientific validity, rationality and objectivity of an organization which will hopefully not be investigated. Officials are encouraged along with their subordinates to use two or more sets of records. One for the inspection of other officials and organizations and one for the privacy of insiders only.
At the same time, bureaucratic propaganda can be used for political purposes while hiding under the cloak of dispensing information.
In its nearly half century of official existence, the US Information Agency employed several thousand persons, mainly for “informing people” in foreign countries (especially the Soviet bloc) via news, education and entertainment broadcasts. (175)
Op-ed pieces are another way of introducing scientific sub-propaganda to an unaware public. Gallup polls supposedly do a “need assessment” for social services or political programs and lo and behind, the bureaucratic organization is found to support public needs. On the other hand, if a research proposal contradicts the purpose of the bureaucratic organization it is not favorably reviewed or funded.
Why people accept bureaucratic propaganda is partly because of the reasons Weber gave in his description of a bureaucracy. There are rational rules which govern an office (not capacious); people compete for their roles (vs nepotism) and are trained in the roles they play. They receive a regular salary and work is supervised. There are records kept of their work.
Demonstrate good ethics
Patrick points out that in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, ethos was the most important element in persuasion. Though propaganda is different than rhetoric in many ways, including that it is impersonal, mass produced and standardized, it is still worth keeping in mind. One of the myths of propaganda is that it does not try to be moral. On the contrary, there is a need for conspicuous displays of ethics and morals in propaganda. One instance of political propaganda is Kipling’s justification for British colonialism as “The White Man’s Burden”.
Patrick points out that a triumph of British and American propaganda during the 20th century was the successful attachment during both World Wars to the label of propaganda solely to Germans. For many, propaganda is associated forever with Joseph Goebbels. When one says propaganda people quickly think of jackboots and swastikas, but these are a direct result of Anglo-American propaganda. Later on, the same thing was done to the Soviet Union and Japan.
The truth was that it was British and Americans who were best at propaganda. It was Bernays who first called propaganda by its real name. He then wisely switched it to “public relations” when he realized propaganda had some nasty political implications which would expose what he was actually doing. Americans disguised their propaganda efforts under euphemistic organizations such as the Committee of Public Information in World War I. In World War II there was TheOffice of Wartime Information.
Good ethics in propaganda means keeping control at all times and showing poise in difficult circumstances. Losing control in public with displays of anger show there might be conflicts between elites or a lack of confidence in propaganda. Secondly, propagandists want to appear as moderates, not as “extremists”. Third, propagandists must be dressed in a respectable manner, be in good shape physically and attractive. Further, other signs of good ethics is that people are open and capable of handling disagreement. Being closed and defensive draws suspicion. Lastly, propagandists should have ethical codes of conduct, mission and vision statements which elevate propagandistic activities to the level of the broader social services.
Dispense selective interpretation of facts
As much as possible propagandists start with facts. What they do then is interpret the facts in a particular way. What the propagandist doesn’t tell you is that there may be four or five other ways of interpreting the facts and connecting the dots that are suppressed. For example, a Freudian propagandist may tell an audience at a psychoanalytic conference that depression is repressed anger. A graduate student may be very impressed. But what the Freudian propagandist will not discuss is that there are cognitive, behavioral, physiological theories of depression as well, and some of the better follow-up results than Freudians.
Distance the propaganda from its source by using front groups like foundations, think tanks, and research patronage
Propagandists rarely go to the public directly. They mediate their message through intermediate organizations such as universities, foundations, think tanks, policydiscussion group, and other organizations I’ll discuss shortly. This gives the propagandist credibility – or the benefit of the doubt that goes with organizations that appear to be just disinterested third parties.
Political sociologist G. William Domhoff in his great book The Powers That Be, lays out a political funnel through which propaganda is disseminated. He starts out by saying the three most powerful economic organizations in Mordor are the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Round Table. It is through these three organizations that all conservative and liberal propaganda is spun. The first level of dissemination is through the board of trustees of universities and through grants that come from foundations. These organizations then set up think tanks. Centrist think tanks are the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute. There are lots of right-wing think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute; the Heritage Foundation; the Cato Institute; The Center for Strategic and International Studies; the Hoover Institute and the Manhattan Project.
The only liberal Think Tank is the Ford Foundation. Johnny-come-lately social democratic think tanks are the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The third level down are policy discussion groups from which testimonies, reports, books and editorials flow. The fourth level is the result of these policy discussion groups that go through mass media newscasts along with the Chambers of Commerce.
All these filters peddle the same conservative-liberal propagandistic line. Willingness to toe the line determines which political candidates are chosen from either party.
The Republicans and Democrats reproduce the same frameworks that were built at the university and foundation level. It doesn’t matter whether these candidates understand upper levels or not. In fact, it is more convincing if they don’t understand what they are doing because it appears that they are making up their own minds in what they say.
Accommodate informational needs and habits of professionals
Aiming propaganda at a mass audience is often wastefully ineffective. It is a shotgun approach because the cynical Patrick says the masses are more likely to be apathetic and inattentive to anything other than sex and food. As Jacques Ellul has revealed, it is not the ruling class that creates propaganda. It is the upper-middle classes that are the explainers of capitalism to the rest of the population. That means that propagandists have to create, package and distributute propaganda in ways that suit the informational requirements and professional routines of journalists, editors, script writers, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade associations, blogs, and news media.
For the past 100 years since the development of modern mass media, propagandists have provided pre-written news articles for use of journalists known as “press releases which benefit media organizations because fewer journalists are needed to process stories. (123)
Most quotes from officials found in press releases are simply made up by the propagandists who write the releases. (124)
What Would Jacques Ellul Say?
Personalizing events
One of the things that would have surprised Ellul is the power that personalization has in moving people. France is less individualistic than Mordor’s ideology and people living in Mordor have become more individualistic in the past sixty years since Ellul wrote his book.
Propaganda in black and white
Ellul was more interested in the subtleties of propaganda. While he did make a distinction between propaganda designed to rile people up (which he called sensibilization) and to cool people out (which he called mithridatization), he was more interested in propaganda that pacified people.
Horizontal propaganda
Ellul did have room for horizontal propaganda in his system but he might have been surprised by the extent it has been developed in adding members of cults and AAA to the mix.
From time to time, academics, and journalists from the Global South, express their disappointment with what they call Western progressive intellectuals. These “progressive intellectuals” are accused of criticizing the imperialist policies of their governments and the propagandist nature of the mainstream media in general terms while relying on the same misinformation and disinformation that the media disseminate and endorse the same imperialist policies that their governments pursue in the Global South, especially against the states and nations which resist Western hegemony.
The response, of these so-called progressive intellectuals to recent socio-political unrest in Iran, expressed in two statements; Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran and Faculty for Women, Life, Freedom, are a case in point. These statements are the responses of two groups of Western academics and feminists to the demonstrations which, after the death in custody of the young Iranian woman Mahsa Amini on 16 September 2022, took place in different Iranian cities. The statements indicate that there must be a grain of truth in the claim of the complaining academics and journalists from the Global South.
While the peaceful demonstrations were turning into riots and mob lynchings, these so-called progressive intellectuals from the global North took the coordinated and ferocious misinformation and disinformation campaign about the events in Iran as indisputable facts. The misinformation and disinformation campaign was first disseminated by the Persian TV Channels which were financed by Europe and the United States and their milking cow, Saudi Arabia, social media, and Western mainstream media. Relying on such a misinformation and disinformation campaign and in unison with their ministries of foreign affairs, these so-called progressive intellectuals interpreted the protests in Iran — which barely gathered a few hundred people in one place — either as a “feminist revolution” in the making that would overthrow the “ruling regime” or an uprising in which “millions of Iranians” have poured into the streets for their basic human rights, the same rights that these “intellectuals” take for granted in Western democracies.
While these progressive intellectuals would never consider any demonstration in the West as a threat to the legitimacy of the governing structure of their countries, nonetheless based on the same misinformation and disinformation campaign on Iran, they not only call into question the legitimacy of the Iranian state in the name of solidarity with the Iranian people but predict its inevitable collapse soon. Regardless of the intentions of their signatories, the real function of the statements should be evaluated in relation to the dynamic geo-strategic role that the Iranian state plays in the West Asia region and its immediate region vis-à-vis the desperate efforts of the Western governments under the leadership of the United State to protect and preserve their supremacy in the region as a component of their global hegemony.
The main message of the misinformation and disinformation campaigns on Iran that misled Western “progressive intellectuals” was that the political system in Iran was on the verge of collapse, that despite the relentless suppression of the demonstrators and mass killings committed by Iranian security forces, the “brave demonstrators” were pouring into the streets by millions, and that Iranian statesmen were escaping the country and taking refuge in other countries. Omid Djallili, the British comedian, claimed that Iran’s leader escaped to Venezuela. According to the misinformation and disinformation campaigns, the revolution that had begun in the name of “Women, Life, Freedom” in Iran would, with the help of “the international community,” overthrow the “Iranian regime” in a matter of days or weeks. We know that “The international community” consists of Western governments and their allies, Western NGOs, movie stars, musicians, and “progressive intellectuals.” The misinformation and disinformation campaign against Iran represented the thugs who lynched, murdered, and assaulted unarmed policemen and ordinary people accused of siding with the Iranian government, and burned public properties,1 as peaceful protesters whose only crime was opposing the “Iranian regime.” This happened even though these “peaceful protesters” took videos of their crimes which were published instantly on the Persian broadcasts funded by Saudi Arabia and Western governments and then appeared in social media. Thanks to their Iranian native informers, the Western “progressive intellectuals” took every piece of misinformation and disinformation as a fact.
The first statement, Listen to the Voices of a Feminist Revolution in Iran, by a group of “feminist activists and academics” and their native informers was published in late September. The statement claimed that “we are witnessing a feminist revolution in Iran” to end the violence of “a theocratic regime” against “the marginal bodies.” The statement which came in the early days of the protests complained about the silence of “the broader academic and activist community around the world” on the event and called upon Western media and academia to make the ongoing “feminist revolution” in Iran more visible. These “academic-feminist activists” describe the “feminist revolution” in Iran as a revolution against a regime that had made women invisible in the public sphere. Hence, they remind the “progressive voices in the Global North” of their ethical and political responsibility and that “the long history of colonial oppression, [and] racism” and “the neo-orientalist approaches” should not prevent them from “taking a full stance of solidarity with the struggles of people in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries.” The statement urges the “progressive voices in the Global North” to recognize not only the epistemic and political subjectivities of the people in these regions in general but recognize as well the epistemic and political subjectivity expressed in the “Iranian feminist and queer resistances” and its role in the ongoing “feminist revolution in Iran.” The “academic-feminist activists” urge “the international feminist communities to build a transnational solidarity network with “women and marginalized bodies in Iran.” They ask the progressive forces in the Global North to recognize the “queer-feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist” character of the current revolution as the struggle of the marginalized bodies for their emancipation from the “Islamic theocracy.”
The second statement, Faculty for Women, Life, Freedom, issued in early October, by a group of scholars whose ideas and visions represent the “progressive voices” from the Global North, called on academics from different parts of the world to show their solidarity with the Iranian “protesters” by boycotting Iranian universities and institutions of higher education. The statement considers the protests as an uprising of the Iranian people that fight in the name of Women, Life, Freedom for the realization of their basic human rights. The subsequent senseless violence and hatred that were expressed toward anyone who criticized the so-called feminist revolution or uprising revealed that the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” were just words without any references to things on the ground, words which were put together to impress people who had no clue of the degree of the hatred expressed, the thirst for acts of revenge expected, the violence exerted and the crimes committed under the banner of this pretty slogan. According to the statement, in the name of Women, Life, Freedom, millions of “brave, courageous, and creative” Iranian protesters came into the streets and university campuses, to challenge “the theocratic dictatorship” and to demand “their basic human rights, dignity, and justice.” The protesters who came “from a range of social classes and regions of the country” refuse, according to the statement, to be cowed by intimidation and repression. Hence, despite their suffering through “gruesome beatings, killings, abductions, and disappearances,” they have created a nationwide uprising. In solidarity with the struggles of the Iranian people “for freedom, equality, and democracy,” the statement calls upon students and scholars around the world to condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran. It asks academics from various countries and continents “to prevent the state institutions of the Islamic Republic and representatives thereof from having any presence in global higher education, be it physically or virtually.” Furthermore, the statement asks academics around the world to use their “influence and capacities” to not only boycott “events and initiatives… backed by the Iranian state or in which officials of the Islamic Republic play an active part” but create an international network to grant “scholarships and fellowships for precarious students and scholars at risk in Iran.” A few days after the release of this statement, the signatories who had realized the scandalous contents of the statement and its unconditional endorsement of the murderous economic sanctions implemented by the US and its Western allies against the Iranian state and people, a postscript was added to the statement. The postscript says that “the “boycott” aspect of the statement “only relates to active and sitting officials holding office in the executive, legislative, judiciary, Office of the Supreme Leader, security, and intelligence apparatuses.” The problem is that those who are imposing economic sanctions on Iran can find the necessary connections between all Iranian scholars and their educational and research institutions to the Iranian state institutions.
It is worth noting that while Jacques Ranciére and Judith Butler are co-signers of the first statement, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Etienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek and Yanus Varoufakis are among the signatories of the second statement. However, many of the scholars who have signed the statement are originally from the Global South and Iran, who live in the Global North. This group of scholars is aware of the ongoing geo-strategic game in the region with the United States and its Western and regional allies on one side and Iran on the opposite side as the key players in the game. While the first statement calls upon the “progressive voices in the Global North” to show their solidarity with the protesters, the second statement shows its solidarity with the protesters by calling on academics from different parts of the world to boycott Iranian state-affiliated academic institutions and exclude Iranian academics from the global higher education. The signatories of both statements would like to call themselves academic activists and regard each other as intellectuals in the way Sartre understood the term in the 1960s. For Sartre, intellectuals are the technicians of practical knowledge who discover and expose the contradiction between the universality of their method of inquiry and the particularity of the dominant ideology. Only the technicians of practical knowledge who in their search for universality discover that universality does not exist but must be created, reinvent themselves as intellectuals because the intellectuals are aware that the dominant ideology is not “a set of clearly defined propositions” but actualized in social and political events.2
A great number of the technicians of practical knowledge in France turned into intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair, because they realized that captain Dreyfus was the victim of the French racist ideology that dominated both the media and the legal institutions. For Sartre, the technicians of practical knowledge turned into intellectuals when in their search for truth and universal knowledge that was supposed to serve the entire humanity, discovered the contradiction between their search for truth and universal knowledge and their practice of knowledge production which served the interests of the ruling class. Since this theoretical contradiction reflects the existing social contradictions between the exploiting few and the exploited masses within the capitalist and imperialist systems, the technicians of practical knowledge have two choices. Either they remain true to their search for truth and universality and take the position of the oppressed masses or continue their contribution to the dominant ideology that safeguards the capitalist and imperialist interests. Now, the question is whose side the signatories of the above mentioned statements are taking? Do they consider themselves to be the progressive forces or intellectuals whose politics is a continuation of their search for truth and universality? The above mentioned statements are not the reflection of the technicians of practical knowledge on a historical event, because a historical event does not happen by naming the coordinated operations of misinformation and disinformation that have targeted Iran a “feminist revolution” or a popular “uprising.” They are the contributions of the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge in the West to the dominant imperialist ideology actualized in the propaganda operations against Iran. Since the knowledge produced in the statements by the “academic-feminist activists” and the “progressive voices in the Global North” on the so-called “feminist revolution” and popular uprising in Iran is a contribution to the rationalization of the imperialist adventure in West Asia.
Rather than a declaration of solidarity with the exploited and oppressed masses in the region, the statements are a gesture of solidarity with the Western Imperialist forces as the principal exploiters and oppressors. On the one hand, the second statement is a supplement to the economic sanctions imposed by the United State and other Western governments on the Iranian state and nation, to make Iran’s economy so unstable that the Iranian society implodes from within as a result of popular discontent and protests. On the other hand, the statement calls for support of the “students and scholars at risk” in Iran in form of student and research grants, while the signatories of the statement are fully aware that they can only depend on Western governments and entrepreneurs close to these governments to finance the “students and scholars at risk” projects. The fact is that both statements contribute to the ongoing imperialist strategy to force the Iranian state into a corner so that it gives concessions to the demands of the US and its allies regarding its peaceful nuclear technology, defense technology, and its political influence in the region. The US and its Western allies consider the Iranian state as the only state in the region, which have both capability and the will to challenge their hegemony in the region. Consequently, they welcome all the support they can get in their multilayered war against Iran. It does not matter whether the support comes from Saudi Arabia in form of money, or from “academic-feminist activists” or “progressive voices from the Global North.”
Since the early 1990s, the so-called progressive intellectuals or voices in the West have been convinced that Western liberal democracies/Global North have reached the end of history. They theorized the idea that the rest of the world or countries in the Global South, that lagged behind these democracies, would be able to overcome their democratic shortcomings either through revolutions or reform, either through bombs or education. Concepts such as feminist revolution and uprising for basic human rights, to which the signatories of the two statements refer, have been brought into the political discourse because the rest of the world is still in the cage of history, and its fate, unlike the West, is determined by the movement of history. In this regard, the Western academic-feminist activists, and the progressive intellectuals, together with their governments and their native informers who stand outside the historical time, act as the omnipotent subjects of the historical movement which is going on in the rest of the world and assign the epistemic and political subjectivity of whoever they want. While they represent small groups of cruel thugs as peaceful demonstrators who exercise their political subjectivity in this “feminist revolution” and “popular uprising,” they are silent about the fact that while the so-called leaders of this so-called revolution or uprising3 are the employees of the US and European governments and that every small and big media which backs this revolution or uprising is financed either by Saudi Arabia, or European governments and the United States.4 Perhaps, the signatories of the above mentioned statements consider their alliance with their governments and the entrepreneurs close to these governments as the rebirth of the alliance between French Enlightenment thinkers and the French bourgeoisie around the demands for freedom and equality which resulted in the French Revolution.
As men of practical knowledge, the Enlightenment thinkers demanded freedom of inquiry as the fundamental requirement for independent research, but this freedom could not be protected without the equality of all citizens before the law. The demand for equality before the law enabled the bourgeois class to mobilize the entire society against the nobility. While the aristocratic nobility accused the Enlightenment thinkers of meddling in affairs that were not theirs, the bourgeoisie defended their right to freedom of inquiry and their right to meddle in public and political affairs. According to Sartre, the moment the Enlightenment thinkers rejected the principles of authority, renewed the spirit of contestation, and embraced the universality of freedom and equality of all men, which became the main principles of bourgeois humanism, they transformed themselves into intellectuals. But after the bourgeoisie achieved its political goals, it integrated the intellectuals into the state bureaucracy and reduced them to mere technicians of practical knowledge whose concrete demand for freedom had been transformed into the bourgeois ideology of freedom.5
As early as the 1840s Marx argued that bureaucracy which had always relied on authority, had succeeded, in its reconstructed and bourgeois version, to make authority the principle of knowledge and obedience the principle of ethics, and thus opposed any form of public or political mentality.6 Marx argues that there is a spiritual aspect to the bourgeois bureaucracy that generates “materialism of passive obedience,” among the individual bureaucrats to the extent that “they are unable to distinguish between their existence and the existence of the bureaucratic system.” As a result, the bureaucrats are convinced that “material life is the only real and meaningful life” and that the most meaningful aim in life is careerism and competition for higher posts.7 In a brief moment of French history, in the mid-1890s, during the Dreyfus Affair, by meddling in an affair that was not theirs, according to the ruling class, a great number of French teachers, doctors, writers, artists, and professors who had been integrated into the bourgeois state as the technicians of practical knowledge, and whose social positions were defined by the ruling class for almost five decades, acted as intellectuals. But the meddling of the technicians of practical knowledge in public affairs did not last long. Soon they returned to their assigned social function which was transmitting the ideology and the received values of the bourgeois state through education and other cultural and political means, provided that the ruling class granted them a degree of social and political power to pursue their group interests.
Up until the late 1970s European communists were trying to convince their states of their usefulness.8 As the transmitters of the received ideology and values, the technicians of practical knowledge have functioned ever since as the agents of ideological particularism of the capitalist and imperialist states and as the servants of the aggressive European nationalism expressed in Nazism or liberal humanism with its claims on universality. What both aggressive European nationalism and liberalism had in common was the idea that non-Westerners are inferior races or only “shadows of men.” Sartre argued that since the European technicians of practical knowledge depended economically on the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class, they were convinced of the inferiority of this class. The reason for such conviction was, according to Sartre, that a small percentage of the technicians of practical knowledge had a working-class background. Sartre was hoping that with the increase in the number of technicians of practical knowledge with working-class backgrounds in France, they would be able to discover the true meaning of bourgeois humanist egalitarianism and its universality and thus expose its particularism.9 The same can be said about the dependence of Western technicians of practical knowledge on the surplus values extracted from the imperialist exploitation of the Global South.
Time has changed, and now, an overwhelming number of the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge, are sons and grandsons, daughters, and granddaughters of working-class parents, some of whom have signed the above mentioned statements. But the statements demonstrate that the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge have internalized the authoritarian principle of the dominant imperialist ideology that assumes that non-Western states and nations have assigned places in the global order and do not hesitate to theorize and justify the decisions of Western governments led by the United States to punish states and nations such as Iran that refuse to recognize this authoritarian and imperialist principle. Some of the signatories of the statements are originally from the Global South and identify themselves with or introduce themselves as the compatriots of the Iranian people and express their solidarity with their struggles but are unable to understand the real meaning of their struggles. Whether as workers, women, intellectuals, or in any other shape, the Iranian people are engaged in numerous social and political struggles to resolve their internal differences, overcome their social and political contradictions, acquire their political and social rights as citizens, and as a nation, they are defining their future by exercising their equal rights with other nations and states by resisting the interference of the outside forces in the West Asia region. But instead of recognizing these socio-political struggles and acting as intellectuals, the technicians of practical knowledge who are originally from the global South chose to contribute to the authoritarian and imperialist disinformation and misinformation campaign that targets the autonomy, dignity, and welfare of the Iranian people, and in doing act as native informers.
Since the US and its Western allies are unable to put Iran in its assigned place in the current global order militarily, they have tried to push the Iranian society toward economic collapse, social disintegration, and political instability, so that it is reduced to a weak or failed state that is ready to surrender the sovereignty of its nation to the West. The function of the native informers, as the technicians of practical knowledge, is to process the received misinformation and disinformation about the events that are supposed to have taken place, in Iran and represent the sporadic protests by a small fraction of Iranian citizens with a specific demand for justice, which barely attracted a few hundred demonstrators, as the million demonstrators who poured into the streets, and describe these sporadic protests as a “feminist revolution” or the uprising of “millions of Iranians.” The result has been the turning of a decent and peaceful political struggle for the realization of a specific form of justice, that is the state’s refraining from the enforcement of the Hijab law, into a series of nihilistic, fascist, and misogynist violent actions resulting in the killing and lynching of more than 60 policemen and the killing of several hundred ordinary people.10 To increase the tension between the discontented people and the Iranian government to the point of no return, the Persian TV stations based in Europe and the US encouraged and even instructed blind violence and then romanticized, in social media and Western mainstream media, the murderous violence that had taken place. First, a group of academic feminists from the Global North call on the “progressive academics and voices” in the Global North to recognize and show their solidarity with what they call a feminist revolution in Iran. Then the so-called progressive academics who do not consider the events in Iran as a revolution, call it the uprising of the Iranian people for their basic human rights, rights that they take for granted in Western democracies. What these “progressive academics” from the Global North do in response to the call of the academic-feminist activists for solidarity with the feminist revolution in Iran is to issue a statement. But in the statement, they demonstrate their gratitude to their democratic governments and support their murderous sanctions against the Iranian people. These sanctions have been a part of the multilayered war against the Iranian state and people to reduce Iran’s geo-strategic role in West Asia and the ongoing global struggles against Western global hegemony led by the United State.
Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers whose search for truth and universality led them to defend freedom and equality for a while and the technicians of practical knowledge who turned into intellectuals by extending their search for truth and universality in the field of ethics and politics, for a brief period, during the Dreyfus Affair, the “progressive academics” or “intellectuals” who signed the above mentioned statements consider authority to be the principle of knowledge. Since the signatories of the above mentioned statements assume the authority of Western imperialism as the principle of the knowledge they are producing, they fail to understand why the Iranian state and nation challenge the hegemony of Western imperialism in their immediate region. Did the signatories of the above mentioned statements, sign the statements, for the material benefits they receive from their governments? We know that Western scholars are using much of their time to apply funds to finance their research projects, and they know that their governments do not forget their sincere gestures of loyalty in matters of national interests and security. Paul Nizan said once that “the bourgeois intellectuals do not fear social revolts because of their dangerous consequences for freedom of thought, but because social revolts may put their income and the wealth they will leave for their children in danger.”11
Nowadays, Western “intellectuals” are highly selective in supporting, theorizing, and instigating protests and riots in the countries in the Global South. They are choosing the riots that while bringing death and destruction to the local people, are strengthening Western global hegemony, and securing the wealth that these “intellectuals” may leave for their children. But many writers and scholars, and especially those who are widely recognized and well-known “intellectuals,” may not defend their immediate material interests, but their ideological interests, embodied or objectified in their work.12 But regardless of the reason, contemporary technicians of practical knowledge in the Global North are not meddling in the imperialist affairs of their governments. Instead, they theorize, conceptualize, and justify those affairs.
While disseminating news about protests and strikes which did not take place, and calling for mass demonstrations and general strikes which never materialized, in the past few months, these Persian TV stations played a central role in instigating, rationalizing and justifying violence against security forces in the streets. “Iran-international, a Saudi funded Persian TV, Guardian. The Manoto TV based in London that has “has lost around 92 million pounds over the years and has been operating with the money received from unknown investors who don’t seem to be concerned about making profits.” “Generous Investors Behind Manoto TV Have Lost 92 Million Pounds,” Iranian Canadian Journal. BBC Persian Funded by UK government, VOA Persian funded by US government, Radio Farda (Persian Radio Free Europe) funded by US government, Radio Zamane financed by Netherlands government.
Sartre, p.235-236.
Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’,” in Selected Writings, Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.35.
Marx, p.37-38.
Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics, From Europe to Iran, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2018.), p. 206.
So, Donald Trump is back on social media. What a perfect moment to grapple with our nation’s crisis of trust.
A 2022 Gallup poll found that less than 30 percent of us have “a great deal (or quite a lot) of confidence in U.S. institutions,” and that’s “as low as it has ever been.” Among 16 institutions tested, 11 registered decline. And the steepest drop? Trust in the presidency “fell off a cliff,” reported CNN.Eight in 10 of us believe our democracy is threatened.
On trust in government, we now rank 26th worldwide between Greece and Hungary.
Such findings are ominous, for the very bedrock of democracy is trust—including trust that political and economic rules are fair so that our voices are heard. And it’s hard to imagine many of us feel heard when wealth and income continue gushing to the top, generating economic inequality roughly on par with Haiti’s and more extreme than in 121 countries. Plus, most of us express reluctance to share our views for fear of offending others.
How many among us would choose this path?
At the same time we experience concentrated private power undermining our wellbeing, as, for example, fossil fuel giants use their vast profits to thwart action on our climate emergency.
All the above is made more threatening by the spreading disinformation disease. It pits citizens against each other and distracts us from focusing on underlying economic unfairness and undemocratic rules, including those suppressing the vote.
“Fake news” has been harming people for centuries, scholars tell us. But in today’s instant-info world, disinformation—a nice word for “lies”—is literally killing us. Four in ten Americans still believe the 2020 “stolen election” lie that triggered an unprecedented insurrection attempt and death.
If you are among this 40 percent, check out reporting by the Heritage Foundation. Considered a conservative center, it has long tracked voter fraud, and our analysis of its data reveals no significant problem.
Our legal system typically limits “freedom of speech” only in cases of libel and defamation—regardless of potential for wider social harm. If this interpretation holds, it is frightening: In November, for example, California lawyers defending doctors “spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines and treatments” argued their clients’ free speech rights were being violated.
Around the world, however, a range of democratic nations are taking a nuanced, citizen-driven approach to combat disinformation.
To guard their citizens’ free speech rights as well as protect against dangerous lies, some are creating transparent public processes, which evolve in response to experience. In Crisis of Trust: How Can Democracies Protect Against Dangerous Lies, a report just released by Cambridge-based Small Planet Institute, we share highlights of five national efforts—New Zealand, Australia, Germany, France, and Sweden.
New Zealand’s approach seems especially useful, as it has been evolving over decades. Note that in the quality of its democracy the country ranks fourth worldwide, according to Freedom House, founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and colleagues in 1941. And the US? We come in a sad 62nd.
Since 1989 the New Zealand Broadcast Standards Authority (BSA) has offered a transparent, public platform in which citizens can flag what they believe to be dangerous disinformation. Hate speech is also covered, as the country strives to protect the interests of its Māori people. An independent board then investigates. If it deems the material both false and harmful, the offending media must be removed or corrected. Complaints and decisions are visible to all on the BSA website.
Overall, the agency appears to exercise caution, requiring removal or correction in response to about 7 percent of complaints. An example of the BSA’s action? A daytime entertainment program airing false Covid information was required to provide correct information in the same program at a similar time of day.
Initiatives of several highly ranked democracies to counter disinformation reflect alarm not primarily about a single lie that could cause great harm—although our own “stolen election” lie certainly qualifies. Rather, they focus on the drip, drip, drip of false messages in our media-saturated lives.
So, is it possible to turn the tide toward truthful exchange? Yes, if we take immediate responsibility as well as carefully embrace long-term strategies.
We can each resist directly; and in taking on this challenge the Global Disinformation Index is a helpful tool. As a society we can learn from specific strategies of nations, such as those mentioned above, protecting freedom-of-speech while creating guardrails against disinformation’s poison. Long-term solutions, however, require our building a more accountable democracy generating greater economic and political equity so that Americans feel trust in government is warranted and are less susceptible to lies.
May the shock of registering our true standing, as well as inspiration and practical lessons from highly regarded democracies, motivate courageous action here.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
On January 19, during one of its raids in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military arrested a Palestinian journalist, Abdul Muhsen Shalaldeh, near the town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). This is just the latest of a staggering number of violations against Palestinian journalists, and against freedom of expression.
A few days earlier, the head of the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate (PJS), Naser Abu Baker, shared some tragic numbers during a press conference in Ramallah. “Fifty-five reporters have been killed, either by Israeli fire or bombardment since 2000,” he said. Hundreds more were wounded, arrested or detained. Although shocking, much of this reality is censored in mainstream media.
The murder by Israeli occupation soldiers of veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, was an exception, partly due to the global influence of her employer, Al Jazeera Network. Still, Israel and its allies labored to hide the news, resorting to the usual tactic of smearing those who defy the Israeli narrative.
Palestinian journalists pay a heavy price for carrying out their mission of spreading the truth about the ongoing Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Their work is not only critical to good and balanced media coverage, but to the very cause of justice and freedom in Palestine.
In a recent report on January 17, PJS detailed some of the harrowing experiences of Palestinian journalists. “Dozens of journalists were targeted by the occupation forces and settlers during the last year, which (recorded) the highest number of serious attacks against Palestinian journalists.”
However, the harm inflicted on Palestinian journalists is not only physical and material. They are also constantly exposed to a very subtle, but equally dangerous, threat: the constant delegitimization of their work.
The Violence of Delegitimization
One of the writers of this piece, Romana Rubeo, attended a close meeting involving over 100 Italian journalists on January 18, which aimed at advising them on how to report accurately on Palestine. Rubeo did her best to convey some of the facts discussed in this article, which she practices daily as the Managing Editor of the Palestine Chronicle.
However, a veteran Israeli journalist, often touted for her courageous reporting on Palestine, dropped a bombshell when she suggested that Palestinians cannot always be trusted with the little details. She communicated something to this effect: Though the truth is on the Palestinian side, they cannot be totally trusted about the little details, while the Israelis are more reliable on the little things, but they lie about the big picture.
As outrageous – let alone Orientalist – such thinking may appear, it dwarfs in comparison to the state-operated hasbara machine of the Israeli government.
But is it true that Palestinians cannot be trusted with the little details?
When Abu Akleh was killed, she was not the only journalist targeted in Jenin. Her companion, another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was present and was also shot and wounded by an Israeli bullet in the back.
Naturally, al-Samoudi was the main eyewitness to what had taken place on that day. He told journalists from his hospital bed that there was no fighting in that area; that he and Shireen were wearing clearly marked press vests; that they were intentionally targeted by Israeli soldiers and that Palestinian fighters were not anywhere close to the range from which they were shot.
All of this was dismissed by Israel, and, in turn, by western mainstream media, since supposedly ‘Palestinians could not be trusted with the little details.’
However, investigations by international human rights groups and, eventually a bashful Israeli admission of possible guilt, proved that al-Samoudi’s account was the most honest detailing of the truth. This episode has been repeated hundreds of times throughout the years where, from the outset, Palestinian views are dismissed as untrue or exaggerated, and the Israeli narrative is embraced as the only possible truth, only for the truth to be eventually revealed, authenticating the Palestinian side every time. Quite often, true facts are revealed too little too late.
The tragic murder of 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Durrah remains the most shameful episode of western media bias, to this day. The death of the boy, who was killed by Israeli occupation troops in Gaza in 2000 while sheltered by his father’s side, was essentially blamed on Palestinians, before the narrative of his murder was rewritten suggesting that he was killed in the ‘crossfire’. That version of the story eventually changed to the reluctant acceptance of the Palestinian reporting on the event. However, the story didn’t end here, as Zionist hasbara continued to push its narrative, smearing those who adopt the Palestinian version as being anti-Israel or even ‘antisemitic’.
(No) Permission to Narrate
Though Palestinian journalism has proved its effectiveness in recent years – with the Gaza wars being a prime example – thanks to the power of social media and its ability to disseminate information directly to news consumers, the challenges remain great.
Nearly four decades after the publishing of Edward Said’s essay “Permission to Narrate”, and over ten years after Rafeef Ziadah’s seminal poem “We Teach Life, Sir”, it seems that, in some media platforms and political environments, Palestinians still need to acquire permission to narrate, partly because of the anti-Palestinian racism that continues to prevail, but also because, per the judgment of a supposedly pro-Palestinian journalist, Palestinians cannot be entrusted with the little details.
However, there is much hope in this story. There is a new, empowered and courageous generation of Palestinian activists – authors, writers, journalists, bloggers, filmmakers and artists – that is more than qualified to represent Palestinians and to present a cohesive, non-factional, and universal political discourse on Palestine.
A New Generation’s Search for the Truth
Indeed, times have changed, and Palestinians are no longer requiring filters – as in those speaking on their behalf, since Palestinians are supposedly inherently incapable of doing so.
The authors of this article have recently interviewed two representatives of this new generation of Palestinian journalists, two strong voices that advocate authentic Palestinian presence in international media: journalists and editors Ahmed Alnaouq and Fahya Shalash.
Shalash is a West Bank-based reporter, who discussed media coverage based on Palestinian priorities, counting many examples of important stories that often go unreported. “As Palestinian women, we have a lot of obstacles in our life and they are (all) related to the Israeli Occupation because it’s very dangerous to work as a journalist. All the world saw what happened to Shireen Abu Akleh for reporting the truth on Palestine,” she said.
Shalash understands that being a Palestinian reporting on Palestine is not just a professional, but an emotional and personal experience, as well. “When I work and I am on the phone with the families of Palestinian prisoners or martyrs, sometimes I break into tears.”
Indeed, stories about the abuse and targeting of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers are hardly a media topic. “Israel puts on the democracy mask; they pretend that they care for women’s rights, but this is not at all what happens here,” the Palestinian journalist said.
“They hit Palestinian female journalists because they are physically weaker; they curse them with very inappropriate language. I was personally detained for interrogation by Israeli forces. This affected my work. They threatened me, saying that if I continued to depict them as criminals in my work, they would have stopped me from being a journalist.”
“In Western media, they keep talking about women’s rights and gender equality, but we don’t have rights at all. We do not live like any other country,” she added.
For his part, Alnaouq, who is the head of the Palestine-based organization ‘We Are Not Numbers’, explained how mainstream media never allow Palestinian voices to be present in their coverage. Even pieces written by Palestinians are “heavily edited”.
“It is also the editors’ fault,” he said. “Sometimes they make big mistakes. When a Palestinian is killed in Gaza or in the West Bank, the editors should say who is the perpetrator, but these publications often omit this information. They do not mention Israel as the perpetrator. They have some kind of agenda that they want to impose.”
When asked how he would change the coverage of Palestine if he worked as an editor in a mainstream Western publication, Alnaouq said:
I would just tell the truth. And this is what we want as Palestinians. We want the truth. We don’t want Western media to be biased toward us and attack Israel, we just want them to tell the truth as it should be.
Prioritizing Palestine
Only Palestinian voices can convey the emotions of highly charged stories about Palestine, stories that never make it to mainstream media coverage; and when they do, these stories are often missing context, prioritize Israeli views – if not outright lies – and, at times, omit Palestinians altogether. But as the work of Abu Akleh, al-Samoudi, Alnaouq and Shalash, and hundreds more, continues to demonstrate, Palestinians are qualified to produce high-quality journalism, with integrity and professionalism.
Palestinians must be the core of the Palestinian narrative in all of its manifestations. It is time to break away from the old way of thinking that saw the Palestinian as incapable of narrating, or of being a liability on his/her own story, of being secondary characters that can be replaced or substituted by those who are deemed more credible and truthful. Anything less than this can be rightfully mistaken for Orientalist thinking of a bygone era; or worse.
Start my morning with me in May 2020: I’ve just fed my dog. I’m brushing my teeth. I’m mentally making my to-do list and trying to decide if I should stay in sweatpants for the third day in a row. And suddenly none of my plans matter, because Trump just posted an insinuation that Black Lives Matter activists should be shot. Facebook declines to remove the post while Mark Zuckerberg fixes his fingers to defend his decision. And my day is toast.
Now that Meta has decided to let Trump back on Facebook and Instagram, I can’t help but have flashbacks to recent years, when bracing myself for whatever fresh hell I would have to experience on the internet became a part of my morning routine.
As a campaigner working on issues related to disinformation and hate speech online, it was a daily struggle to contain harassment, patch up digital security gaps, and accurately distinguish between legitimate political discourse and incitement or even personal threats that could easily derail my life.
Fast forward to 2023. I was quietly enjoying the past two years of a Trump-free social media feed, until Elon Musk nearly burns down Twitter and then unbans Trump via poll results, while Facebook unleashes that man back into my feeds as well.
There’s no doubt about it. Trumpism has made the U.S. an even more dangerous place, and Trump should absolutely not be allowed back on Facebook because he is a threat to not only democracy, but also public safety.
Trump is merely one part of a bigger issue. Trumpism online exploited what was already there: the profit-over-people business model of our digital spaces. As long as hate and disinformation can be monetized, social media companies will give platforms to Trump, mini-Trumps, disinformation bots, and other aspiring fascists.
It’s not like the remedies are mysteries. In 2021, Kairos ran a campaign called The Facebook Logout, where we organized thousands of Facebook and Instagram users to temporarily log out of their accounts in a show of user power. The campaign’s demands were simple: real data privacy, transparency, better content moderation, and an end to the free flow of hate speech and disinformation on the platforms. This campaign sparked a conversation about what users wanted Meta to do to make the platform safe for them. Our demands are still relevant today.
As is the activism: Accountable Tech and Media Matters has relaunched a campaign, bringing together other groups, communities, and individuals to put pressure on Meta to keep Trump off Facebook. And the return of Trump to Facebook is on Congress’s radar as well.
There has to be a world where social media companies spend less energy trying to keep a good public image and more time fixing the harms happening on their platform. This is the vision that campaigners, organizers, and users continue to work towards.
From 2016 until now, I’ve seen an increase in the number of people talking about the offline consequences of allowing bad actors to be online without moderation. And though it’s important to continue that conversation, we cannot assume that if social media executives de-platformed bad actors the world would be a better place.
I remember Pizzagate, Covid-19 “miracle cures,” “Stop the Steal,” and that attempted coup, but I don’t blame Trump alone. We can’t simply point to one or some bad guys as the root of all our problems. The internet adds fuel to the fires individuals set—and the platforms profit by handing out matches. So, yes, let’s extinguish what we can, but let’s also dream and plan what our online spaces could look like if user safety and agency were acknowledged and respected. What would life be like if we users were involved in governing the online spaces that we live in?
My morning routines would probably go more like: feeding my dog, brushing my teeth, and opening my phone without fear. My accounts would already be opted out of targeted advertising by default. My feed would be full of people I choose to follow. My community’s online organizing efforts wouldn’t be subject to harassment. And by the time my aunt calls me to ask “did you see what’s happening on the Facebook?” whatever outright lie she saw will have been removed.
I have moments of uncertainty but I always come back to what I am fighting for: a world where tech works for all. I still believe it is possible if we work towards it together.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Australia’s media regulator will be able to request information from digital platforms on their efforts to reduce the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation under legislative reforms planned for later this year. The Australian Communications and Media Authority is set to receive new information-gathering and record-keeping powers, as the scale of online misinformation and disinformation…
Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners are, themselves, in one way or another, employees or other official agents of Lockheed Martin, but others are not: one needn’t be officially a “part of” the firm in order for the firm to be one’s agent. This is instead the power of money and of ownership — not of any official status. Usually, stockholding is the main means by which it’s exercized. Corporations were planned and designed in this way, in the years 1600 and 1602, in England and in Holland, partly because the then-rising public opposition against the official, titled, nobility or aristocrats, was beginning to raise questions among the aristocracy, as to whether, some day, official titles might become more of a personal burden to be borne than of a personal asset to continue to flaunt publicly (such as by such titles as “Duke” “Lord” “Baron” or etc.). That was one of the main motives for the creation of the corporate form.
From its very outset, empire was to have its own army and armed forces, in order to be able to coerce the local aristocracy in a seized vassal-nation to cooperate with the imperial power, so as for those two national aristocracies jointly to exploit and extract wealth from the vassal nation and from its population. This was the start of capitalism. The armaments-makers and mercenaries have always been crucial to its foundation, and the result is popularly called “imperialism” or (in the United States, “neoconservatism,” though there is nothing really “neo” about it, except, as Mussolini called the two synonyms, “corporationism” and “fascism,” marking the historical transition away from agrarian-based feudalism, into its replacement by the international-corporate version of aristocracy — which is based on ownership of stock instead of land).
So: as the world’s largest armaments-maker, Lockheed Martin is quite naturally itself foundational to the U.S. empire. A few instances of how it functions that way will here be described:
And Biden did then follow Schwartz’s advice, and has remained loyal to him. This was an example of Lockheed’s impact upon a Democratic Party public official who serves the military-industrial complex (MIC) instead of the public.
Here is what I wrote on 26 March 2019, under the heading “Mueller’s Record of Framing Innocent People to Protect the Guilty, an excerpt concerning a Republican Party official, James Comey, who likewise serves Lockheed and the rest of the MIC instead of the public:
*****
The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as-of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.
Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.
After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.
Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.
Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.
He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.
*****
The MIC has far more key agencies than are generally known. One is In-Q-Tel, whose pernicious character is so obvious that practically nothing can be said about that corporation without revealing its inconsistency with any democratic republic.
Originally named Peleus and known as In-Q-It, In-Q-Tel was founded by Norm Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and by Gilman Louie, who was In-Q-Tel’s first CEO.[4][5][7] In-Q-Tel’s mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. According to the Washington post, In-Q-Tel started as the idea of then CIA director George Tenet [the man who told G.W. Bush that fooling the American people to believe that Saddam had WMD would be “a slam dunk”]. Congress approved funding for In-Q-Tel, which was increased in later years.[6] Origins of the corporation can also be traced to Ruth A. David, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1990s and promoted the importance of rapidly advancing information technology for the CIA.[5] In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community.[8] In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.
“We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM–DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.[9]“
In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over US$2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]
However, at the lower levels — the hirees of the mega-corporations that are doing this, instead of at the top levels that more-directly represent the controlling stockholders — there is far more confusion, and even outright stupidity, as those front-line workers who carry out the censorship are struggling to do their jobs in the face of the multiple self-contradictory hypocritical instructions they get from corporate management, gobblydegook such as this, which is a link from Matt Taibbi’s 2 December 2022 “1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES”: his report about how the heavily Democratic-Party suckers who had been hired by the heavily Democratic-Party billionaires who control that corporation (Twitter) managed to hide from most Americans (until AFTER the 2022 mid-term elections) the reality of the scandal about what was contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop. Only at the topmost level — the board members and the top executives — is the actual motive (U.S. imperialism. a.k.a., “neoconservatism”) actually known and understood. Blaming the suckers down below can’t even possibly endanger, but instead protects, the real culprits (the beneficiaries — in BOTH Parties — of this imperialism). Censorship itself poisons and kills democracies: all of it is inconsistent with democracy and advances ONLY aristocracy, theocracy or any other form of dictatorship. Whereas the employees of firms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Guardian, NewsGuard, etc., might not know this, the top-level people there do, and they are the ones who have selected and hired those lower-level workers, to carry out their dirty-work, for the billionaires, and especially for their ‘defense’ contractors, who control the Government. It’s the controlling mega-corporate investors, basically, who are the beneficiaries of what this Government does, and this is the reality of neoconservatism (U.S. imperialism).
“In 2021, only 486 people died using California’s assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives…
“Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a well-known vaccinologist who served on the data monitoring committee charged with ensuring the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, previously worked as a paid consultant and advisor to Pfizer.”
President Édouard Fritch of French Polynesia says he wants to boost funds to study journalism in French Polynesia in a bid to help strengthen the media industry quality, reports RNZ Pacific.
According to the local Ministry of Education, the amount given for study grants will vary from US$536 to US$1341 per month, depending on the level of study.
Fritch told La Première television about the “growing threat of false information” and the importance of reliable news outlets.
“Those social media pages escape the realm of news outlets, they shy away from all verification and create confusion and worse, they act as the public’s spokesperson,” he said.
“That is why I think it is a must that the journalism sector must be supported by the country.”
La Première in Tahiti heads the audience share with 36.5 percent. Figures for other territories are: French Guyana 33.4 percent, Mayotte 31.4 percent, New Caledonia 30.2 percent, Gaudeloupe 27.1 percent, Martinique 18.1 percent, and Réunion 14.5 percent.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
A study published Monday by researchers at New York University eviscerated liberal Democrats’ assertion that the Russian government’s disinformation campaign on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election had any meaningful impact on the contest’s outcome.
The
study, which was led by NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, is based on a survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. respondents’ Twitter activity. The researchers—who also include scholars from the University of Copenhagen, Trinity College Dublin, and Technical University of Munich—concluded that while “the online push by Russian foreign influence accounts didn’t change attitudes or voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. election,” the disinformation campaign “may still have had consequences.”
\u201cYesterday @NatureComms published our paper about Russia\u2019s foreign influence efforts *on Twitter* in the 2016 election. We’ve seen many claims about the implications of the findings, so we want to be clear about what the paper says and what it doesn\u2019t. 1/\n \nhttps://t.co/coMxO2JR3j\u201d
— NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (@NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics)
1673376947
According to the paper:
Exposure to Russian disinformation accounts was heavily concentrated: Only 1% of users accounted for 70% of exposures. Second, exposure was concentrated among users who strongly identified as Republicans. Third, exposure to the Russian influence campaign was eclipsed by content from domestic news media and politicians. Finally, we find no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.
“Despite this massive effort to influence the presidential race on social media and a widespread belief that this interference had an impact on the 2016 U.S. elections, potential exposure to tweets from Russian trolls that cycle was, in fact, heavily concentrated among a small portion of the American electorate—and this portion was more likely to be highly partisan Republicans,” said Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of the Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the study’s authors.
“The specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”
Gregory Eady of the University of Copenhagen, and one of the study’s co-lead authors, cautioned that “it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity.”
The new study may boost arguments of observers who contend that Democrats bear much of the blame for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat by former GOP President Donald Trump. Clinton’s loss, many say, is largely attributable to a deeply flawed Democratic ticket consisting of two corporate candidates including a presidential nominee who, according to former Green presidential contender Ralph Nader, “never met a war she did not like,” and an anti-abortion vice presidential pick in Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
“That Russian intelligence attempted to influence the 2016 election, broadly speaking, is by now well documented,” The Intercept’s Sam Biddle wrote in an analysis of the study. “While their impact remains debated among scholars, the specter of ‘Russian bots’ wreaking havoc across the web has become a byword of liberal anxiety and a go-to explanation for Democrats flummoxed by Trump’s unlikely victory.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Fiji’s opposition leader Voreqe Bainimarama has been warned to provide evidence of allegations he has made against the coalition government or face the full brunt of the law.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka issued the warning in a national address yesterday in response to Bainimarama’s claims that the situation in Fiji had deteriorated since Rabuka came into office.
Rabuka said he offered a hand of co-operation and wished to develop a positive relationship with the FijiFirst party, but Bainimarama has made it clear that he rejects the idea of both sides of Parliament working together.
“In recent days, Mr Bainimarama has been bombarding the country with lies and misinformation,” Rabuka said.
“He alleges that Fiji is in some sort of crisis, that our new coalition government is engaged in repressive, oppressive conduct.”
He said Bainimarama went on to claim that Fiji was reliving the “dark ages” and that families were living in fear of job losses.
He said the former prime minister had also attempted to terrify the public by trying to create racial disharmony along with former attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum.
‘Message for Bainimarama’
“Members of our coalition have a message for Bainimarama,” Rabuka said.
“On behalf of the people, we demand specific details of reports that you have received that we have acted unconstitutionally, contrary to the rule of law and in violation of good governance, and committed other transgressions.
“If he fails to provide the details of what he has published in his attempt to smear the image of our coalition, then he and those who are working with him are going to face consequences within the law.”
In a statement this week, Bainimarama claimed they had received “further reports of certain matters” that were taking place in government and that were detrimental to the Constitution, rule of law and governance.
Meanwhile, police public relations officer Ana Naisoro yesterday confirmed receiving complaints against the former prime minister, alleging his statements were inciteful.
Arieta Vakasukawaqais a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The true résumé is rarely honest. The entire document is based on a stream of twisting embellishments, fanciful achievements, and, in some cases, pure fiction. Read it, as you would, an autobiography, which could only interest audiences by what it omits, what it underlines, and what it pretends to celebrate. The wrinkles vanish, the wounding sores patched; the skin moisturised, the face lifted by delicate textual surgery. Its writing, and its acceptance by any relevant audience, is a mutual conceit, a pact against veracity.
The number of individuals who make use of this mechanism is embarrassing. Academics speak of projects they never undertook nor finished, and degrees doctored rather than earned. In a good number of cases, diplomas and awards mentioned are not all they seem – the global market for purchasable PhDs is healthy and thriving. Some claim to have legal qualifications they lack, and others fantasise about unattained military honours and tours of duty they never completed.
Any résumé that also purports to be true is bound to be irrelevant. Many job appointments are already filled before the paperwork is sent in. The favoured candidate, however inferior, must be boosted by the quality of the alternatives. That the alternatives are better is not a chance they will succeed, but cast glorious sunlight on the nepotistic pick, the favoured winner. The mediocre are long in such affairs.
The true résumé, in short, is short on truth. All it needs do is mention a name, preferably correctly (the right spelling is a bonus), a few bottom drawer achievements, and the rest can be put down to research by the employer or, in the case of politics, the voters in question.
This raises, then, the fundamental point about the role of such a document in certain fields. Why even bother trusting the biographical portraits of politicians, notably those of salad day persuasion? The art and the craft of the position demands deception, truthful lies and lying truths. A good turn of phrase, a deodorising spray of charm, helps.
It follows that such a document is redundant before going to press, to brochure, and to postings on a social media channel. You cannot trust it, and you are a fool to. Even worse is to get excited about it after the fact.
This leads us to the New York Republican and Representative-elect George Santos, who has been put into the stockade, if only by the press, for his schoolboy fibbing and childish howlers. “My sins here,” he mumbles, “are embellishing my résumé.”
It transpires that the 34-year-old representative-elect did not graduate from college (it probably would have spoiled his education), nor worked for Mammon’s cutthroat representatives, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup (a fact impressively moral, surely?). His portfolio of 13 properties was also make-believe – he lives with his sister in Long Island. His mother did not die “in her office in the south tower” of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but in 2016. Then came that slightly tricky addition of identity politics – good if you can get away with it, dangerous if you end up on the gallows. That matter was the question of his Jewishness.
The New York Times could barely hide its astonishment at such a smorgasbord selection by Santos. “While others have also embellished their backgrounds and military honors that they did not receive or distortions about their business acumen and wealth, few have done so in such a wide-ranging manner.” The paper was indignant at the fact that voters “didn’t know about his lies before casting their ballots.”
The list of political figures sporting sketchy biographies, if not outright lies, is lengthy and not confined to any one party or ideology. Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren had a hack at claims of Native American ancestry and was found wanting. In August 2019, she put the whole matter down to a case of oversight. “Like anyone who’s being honest with themselves, I know that I have made mistakes.”
The current US President, one Joseph R. Biden Jr, was also susceptible to improving his academic record for public consumption. In 1987, he inflated his double major in history and political science from the University of Delaware into three degrees rather than a single B.A. in history and political science. His claim that he had gone to law school on a full academic scholarship was corrected by Newsweek’s finding that Biden had gone to Syracuse “on half scholarship based on financial need.”
For those who treat the truth with molesting disdain, Santos is impressively and pathologically consistent. But he hopes that his audience will be receptive and forgiving. “I’m very much gay,” he remarks, hoping to shrug off the demon of unfashionable heterosexuality. His marriage of five years to a woman was one of those things that made him ponder. “People change. I’m one of those people who change.” Steady on, Representative-elect; you have changed quite enough already.
Santos has also promised to “be effective” and “good.” There is no reason to assume that he will be either, but that’s merely in line with his résumé. Any politician claiming achievement ahead of attainment is a clown to be celebrated before the guillotine of real expectations.
If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.
Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says: “… if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”
No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.
US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.
During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated: “Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”
In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.
Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.
It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.
The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.
The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed: “… further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”
Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.
The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.
AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.
AFL states: “What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”
The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.
Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.
The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.
The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.
Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.
In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund.
Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).
The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.
On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.” It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.
Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.
Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.
Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.
Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe co-morbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?
Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?
And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?
Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.
While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.
After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.
Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.
And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.
But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!
Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.
COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.
And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.
But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.
Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).
And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.
These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.
In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.
Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.
This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.
Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!
When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).
This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).
I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.
group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).
The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.
PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.
It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.
If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.
There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).
On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.
I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:
Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:
I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:
[I pasted in D.’s message to me.]
As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.
It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:
Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site
(but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:
You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!
Sincerely,
Eric Zuesse
Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:
I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?
D. responded:
Dear Eric,
Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.
I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.
Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.
Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.
Kind Regards
D.
Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:
We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?
[Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]
We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.
For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”
[The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]
However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. …Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”
In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.
In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]
An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)
The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”
Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?
[Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:
These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).
The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.
Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.
The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.
Julian Assange once observed that, ‘Nearly every war has been the result of media lies.’ For daring to publish evidence of US war crimes, Assange now sits in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, at risk of being extradited to the US within the next few weeks. The prospects for a fair trial range from miniscule to zero.
In a recent interview, WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson told US journalist Glenn Greenwald that legal avenues in London to challenge Assange’s unlawful extradition were being exhausted. What is needed now is, not recourse to a legal system that is subservient to power, but a political fight, as Hrafnsson explained:
In my perception, and I’ve been sitting in on all the proceedings in London, all the extradition proceedings in London have exposed only one thing, and that’s the fact that this is just not going to be won in a court. There’s no justice to be had in court rooms in London. That’s obvious and I don’t have to mention the United States, that’s one of the essences of the defence in fighting the extradition, that he will never be able to get a fair trial there. So, we’re running out of time. We need to push this on a different level and so I decided that we needed to go on a tour to shore up political support, because the only way to fight a political persecution is through political means.
The Guardian recently joined with the New York Times, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel in publishing an open letter calling on US President Joe Biden to end Assange’s prosecution. It has been ten years since Assange sought refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. After being dragged from the embassy by police in April 2019, Assange has been locked up in the harsh regime of Belmarsh prison, suffering from failing physical and mental health. Indeed, according to then UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, Assange is literally a victim of torture. In 2020, the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, published a letter from Doctors for Assange, with 216 signatories from 33 countries, drawing urgent attention to ‘the ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange.’
US political writer Thomas Scripps noted that the open letter from the five newspapers:
makes clear that Assange has been the victim of a monstrous campaign of state persecution, costing him years of his life and good health, for revealing state criminality, designed to set a chilling example for others.
But what took them so long to speak out? Scripps observed:
The conduct of these newspapers over the past decade has been thoroughly reprehensible. Their efforts to poison public opinion against Assange, to give credence to the false claims and accusations made against him, facilitated the American state’s persecution of this principled and courageous journalist.
Australian journalist John Pilger, who has done so much to raise public awareness of Assange’s plight, was scathing:
The editors of the Guardian, NY Times etc. finally speak up for Julian #Assange — weasel words and 10 years late. Ten years after the Guardian made public WikiLeaks’ secret password and launched a campaign of vilification against a truthteller.
The Guardian, which has played a major role in the persecution of Julian #Assange, is now scurrying for cover with a call for him to be freed. But even its weasel statement repeats malign fiction about his failure to redact files.
Pilger was referring to the oft-repeated smear that the WikiLeaks co-founder recklessly endangered the lives of informants when publishing information that exposed US war crimes. In fact, Assange was extremely careful in redacting names, and he was effectively thrown to the wolves by both the Guardian and the New York Times.
How do we know this? Award-winning Australian journalist Mark Davis was an eyewitness to the preparation of the Afghan War Logs in 2010 for newspaper publication, documented in Davis’s film, Inside Wikileaks. Davis spoke at a public meeting in Sydney in 2019 and said that he was present alongside Assange in the Guardian’s ‘bunker’ where a team from the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel worked on the publication of articles based on, as the NYT put it:
‘A six-year archive of classified military documents [that] offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.’
Davis attested that, far from being ‘cavalier’ about releasing documents that might endanger lives, it was:
Guardian journalists [who] neglected and appeared to care little about redacting the documents.’
Moreover, they had a ‘graveyard humour’ about people being harmed. No one, he stated emphatically, expressed concern about civilian casualties except Assange.
As Oscar Grenfell explained in a piece for the World Socialist Web Site: ‘David Leigh and Nick Davies, senior Guardian journalists, who worked closely with Assange in the publication of the logs, have repeatedly claimed that Assange was indifferent to the consequences of the publication.’
These Guardian claims were pivotal in corporate media smears against Assange. They were also crucial in US government claims that publication ‘aided the enemy’.
However, noted Grenfell:
In reality, the US and Australian militaries have been compelled to admit that release of the Afghan war logs did not result in a single individual coming to physical harm. [our emphasis]
As Scripps pointed out, the open letter is evidence that the five newspapers, including the Guardian and NYT, were well aware from the start that Assange ‘was functioning as a journalist, innocent of any crime.’
Why speak out now in defence of Assange, ten years too late? The likely concern is that a US show trial would expose the newspapers’ own nefarious role in providing cover for US war crimes, as well as in enabling the persecution of Assange.
There is also another vital element in the timing. As Scripps wrote: ‘This exposure of US war crimes would come at a time when the United States is expanding its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, sold to the public on the grounds that US intervention is necessary to prevent Russian atrocities.’
‘The Public Despises the Corporate Media’
It is vital for state and corporate power that public trust in the news media – a key conduit for carrying and amplifying Western propaganda – does not collapse entirely. In the US, trust in the news has fallen to an historic low. The percentage of Americans who say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in newspapers has fallen to 16%. For television news, it is even lower at 11%.
In response to these findings, Glenn Greenwald was blunt:
The public despises the corporate media. There is almost nobody held in lower esteem or who is more distrusted and abhorred than the liberal employees of large media corporations. Nobody wants to hear from them, so in-group arrogance is all they have left.
Here in the UK, in the past year alone, the public has seen reshuffling and defenestration of Tory Prime Ministers, governments and ministers in a kind of bizarre soap opera. This has been reported as serious political drama by mass media outlets, most especially BBC News, that permit no serious scrutiny of state-corporate power; no substantive challenge to the special interests that rule the country for themselves, while the population suffers and the climate emergency worsens.
As we noted in a media alert earlier this year, the rise of oligarchical politics has seen a great merger of politics and the media that dominates how the UK is run. Yet another example of this phenomenon was highlighted recently by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media:
Richard Sharp, BBC chairman, was Rishi Sunak’s boss at Goldman Sachs, donated £400k to the Conservatives, & was once an adviser to Boris Johnson.
My generation & those younger need to be realistic. Big parts of British public life aren’t democratic. And it’s getting worse.
In a recent interview with Mark Curtis of Declassified UK, John Pilger exposed the insidious, power-serving nature of the British media. He took particular aim at the BBC: ‘I’ve always found it amusing, bemusing, that so many people in the BBC see themselves as having entered into a Nirvana of objectivity, as if their objectivity and impartiality have been given to them intravenously.’
He continued:
Andrew Marr was very good at waxing on lyrically about this. Andrew Marr, the political editor of the BBC, who made a victory speech virtually on behalf of Tony Blair outside Number 10 Downing Street in 2003. […] Tony Blair, he said, tonight as the troops have gone into Iraq, he has been “proved conclusively right”. Conclusively right! And Andrew Marr was absolutely eloquent in talking about the BBC as a national treasure of objectivity. Of course, Orwell called it “doubletalk”.
Long-time readers will be aware that we have highlighted Marr’s valedictory words from Downing Street, a shameful performance that ought to have ended his career:
I don’t think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he’s somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result. (BBC News at Ten, 9 April, 2003)
Pilger also pointed to the ongoing ‘tsunami of propaganda’ about Ukraine which is ‘something I’ve never seen before’, including even the lies told about Iraq in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. When it comes to ‘opposing views or informed views’ on Ukraine, ‘none of them have been allowed in’ by the media, he said.
As for the Guardian and its coverage of foreign affairs: ‘We have some people now who are an absolute disgrace, especially on the reporting of Ukraine [and] Russia.’
The Independent carried a rare dose of sanity last week when it permitted a piece by Mary Dejevsky, formerly the newspaper’s foreign correspondent in Moscow. Dejevksy observed that the informed view that ‘Western provocations’ had played a major role in precipitating the Ukraine war is virtually absent from news coverage. Specific factors that are routinely ignored by the BBC and the other major news media include:
post-Cold War triumphalism, the green light for former East bloc states to join Nato despite what Russia understood to have been promises to the contrary, the 2014 ousting of Ukraine’s democratically elected president – which Russia saw as a US-inspired coup – and the ways the West subsequently drew Ukraine into the Western bloc, with the EU association agreement and Nato military assistance, even as it abrogated Cold War arms control treaties one after one, or allowed them to lapse.
Consideration of such facts matter, she noted, ‘because without understanding why Russia invaded, there can be no understanding of what will be needed for a lasting peace.’
Robin Andersen, who teaches media studies at Fordham University in the US, also pointed to the dangers of not permitting a proper understanding of how we got here; not least because it involves heavily nuclear-armed states:
Without context and accuracy, reasoned discourse and the ability to find solutions or engage in diplomacy are beyond our reach as we approach nuclear Armageddon. Corporate newsframes regularly exclude alternative voices of peace and those who call for an end to war, leaving out an entire discourse that has animated global discussions about conflict resolution for decades.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and foreign policy analyst, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:
I think both sides see that there is no military way out. I’m speaking of NATO and Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other side. This war, like von Clausewitz told us two centuries ago, is politics by other means, or with other means, meaning that there are political issues at stake here, and those are what need to be negotiated.
Sachs continued:
Much of this war has been about NATO enlargement, from the beginning. And, in fact, since NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia were put on the table by President George W. Bush Jr. and then carried forward by the U.S. neocons basically for the next 14 years, this issue has been central, and it’s been raised as central. But President Biden, at the end of 2021, refused to negotiate over the NATO issue.
He pointed out that the urgent need for the war not to escalate, perhaps towards nuclear Armageddon, demands that the issue of NATO expansion be negotiated immediately, adding:
There are other issues, as well, but the point is, this war needs to end because it’s a disaster for everybody, a threat to the whole world. According to European Union President Ursula von der Leyen last week, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died, 20,000 civilians. And the war continues. And so, this is an utter disaster, and we have not searched for the political solution.
To return to Julian Assange, the need for independent media that serve the public and scrutinise power has thus never been greater. The pattern of the media calling for one war after another, as media analyst Alan MacLeod highlighted in a recent tweet, is persistent and abhorrent:
‘Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough’
‘Bomb North Korea, Before It’s too Late’
‘Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal’
‘To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran’
On and on it goes. This media-promoted war fever, whose primary beneficiary is the Western military-intelligence-industrial complex, must end; for the sake of humanity.
New Twitter chief and exploding-car entrepreneur Elon Musk has given a team access to the website’s data archives in order to examine its content moderation actions. The investigators include former New York Times editor Bari Weiss and podcaster-journalist Matt Taibbi, amongst others.
Their findings are being released under the hashtag #TwitterFiles, and they’re being hyped to reveal some conspiracy to suppress right-wing and fringe voices. But as always, the truth appears to be that the right is once again crying about the fact that hate speech and conspiracy theories will get you banned from social media – who’d have thought it?
Hunter Biden’s laptop, again
Taibbi’s first thread revolved around the removal of Donald Trump from the platform, and the controversy around Hunter Biden’s laptop. This story originally came from the New York Postand concerned now-US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter using his connection to his dad to get in with a Ukrainian natural gas company. Sordid, for sure, but hardly uncommon, or even condemned, in the world of politics. Taibbi claimed that:
Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.
Back in the real world, the #TwitterFiles appear to have exposed… Twitter employees scrambling to react appropriately to what seemed to be a Russian hacking operation, during an incredibly volatile political moment in the US.
In turn, many Twitter users chose to focus on the outrage that right-wingers couldn’t freely post illegally obtained photographs of politicians’ family members’ genitalia:
tHe TwItTeR fILeS:
Day 1: Twitter just deleted pics of Hunter Biden's junk when asked. Zero pushback. Unbelievable.
Pre-Day 2: Via a journalistic technique known as 'asking', we shockingly discovered that a Twitter lawyer was reviewing The Twitter Files before we got them!!
THE TWITTER FILES is funny, the tone they're described in is like watergate or wikileaks but instead of war crimes it's about pics of Hunter Biden's penis and why Libs of TikTok couldn't post for 2 days.
— The Path of the Alpha–BenghaziExpert 5'4.5" (@BenghaziExpert) December 9, 2022
Republicans tried to destroy Hillary using her emails but it was a nothing burger
They then tried to destroy Biden using Hunter’s laptop but it was a nothing burger
Now they’re trying to destroy Dems using the Twitter files but it’s STILL a nothing burger
In turn, Weiss chose to dig into nefarious blacklisting and tweet suppression:
1. A new #TwitterFiles investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees build blacklists, prevent disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limit the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics—all in secret, without informing users.
The problem with this masterstroke of investigative journalism is, however, that Twitter was open about the fact that it suppressed tweets. In fact, it released a blog post detailing the subject in 2018. It stated, quite clearly:
We do rank tweets and search results. We do this because Twitter is most useful when it’s immediately relevant. These ranking models take many signals into consideration to best organize tweets for timely relevance. We must also address bad-faith actors who intend to manipulate or detract from healthy conversation.
So today's Twitter Files scoop from the author of "San Fransicko" is that someone responsible for content moderation was moderating content associated with baseless conspiracy theories, and we're supposed to be very upset about it! pic.twitter.com/xvykMQRlqD
— steven ''italian elon musk'' monacelli (@stevanzetti) December 11, 2022
Shellenberger once again pulls out the galaxy-brained claim that Twitter's moderation practices violated "free speech"…somehow.
Yes, Trump alone, distinct from other political leaders, used Twitter to repeatedly deny the election results and then fomented a seditious riot. pic.twitter.com/d1FyjBpnDe
I don’t have it in me to comment much on this Twitter Files farce – but it’s really striking how all these supposedly scandalous “revelations” have either been public knowledge – or make the old Twitter regime look eminently reasonable: People trying, in difficult circumstances. https://t.co/wqvTExiPL0
The next instalment of the #TwitterFiles will apparently focus on coronavirus and US chief medical advisor Anthony Fauci. Surely, it will be just as measured and responsible as the previous reporting under the hashtag. Maybe eventually we’ll get around to investigating why a set of hack journalists have been given access to unknown quantities of Twitter data? Don’t hold your breath, though.
Marc Limon, Executive Director of the Universal Rights Group – on 29 November 2022 – published a blog post, “Twitter’s descent reminds us of the dangers of free speech absolutism” which is worth reading in full:
..A decade ago normative interpretations of freedom of expression under international human rights law and under relevant resolutions of the Human Rights Council were fairly finely balanced between the ‘anything goes’ ideology espoused by the United States (US) as well as by American human rights lawyers and experts (including several Special Rapporteurs) on the one hand, and those States and experts (especially from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – OIC) advocating a far more interventionist approach, on the other. However, over recent years the needle has shifted discernibly towards the latter view.
There are several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important are, first, a growing recognition, initially on the part of European countries but also increasingly in the US, of the growing threat posed by incitement to religious or racial hatred (i.e., ‘hate speech’) to human rights in the digital age, and second, a growing acknowledgement that disinformation (or ‘fake news’) spread online can no longer be held in check by societal checks and balances (i.e., the long-held American view that ‘best antidote to bad speech is more speech’) and thus poses a direct threat to democracy. In a stark example of the latter point, the administration of President Joe Biden has repeatedly acknowledged, and promised to respond to, the key role that disinformation about US elections (i.e., ‘stop the steal’) played in inciting the mob that attacked Congress in January 2021.
Today, the international community, including members of the Human Rights Council, while certainly not united on the thorny question of the threshold between speech that is ok and speech that is not, at least share something of a (albeit wide) common ground.
What is more, that growing intergovernmental consensus has been reflected in the operations of another former absolutist bastion of free speech: the social media giants. Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter have been at the forefront of this shift, bringing in increasingly sophisticated content moderation protocols heavily influenced by international human rights law and by guidance provided by Treaty Bodies, Special Procedures, and UN frameworks like the Rabat Plan of Action.
Is Larry soaring or hurtling towards the ground?
Which makes recent developments at Twitter (Larry is the name of the blue Twitter bird), following the company’s takeover by Elon Musk, all the more dispiriting – but also all the more instructive (i.e., demonstrating that the Human Rights Council and the wider UN have been moving in the right direction over the past ten years).
Elon Musk is a freedom of expression absolutist who, moreover, subscribes to the widely held view among such extremists that free speech is being threatened by a censoring ‘woke’ orthodoxy.
Musk arrived at Twitter with a hard-line approach based on a belief that the platform’s efforts over recent years to check hate speech and malicious disinformation is part of some left-wing plot to destroy free speech and thus, in his mind, to threaten democracy. That is why he is now on a crusade to allow suspended users back on to the platform. The accounts of Donald Trump, Kanye West, and Jordan Peterson have been reinstated, along with nearly all those that were suspended for falling foul of old Twitter’s content rules on abuse, disinformation, and hate speech.
This means that Twitter is about to turn into a very unpleasant and potentially dangerous experiment in the reality of free expression without limit.
It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth, and it is not hyperbolic to suggest that in the Russian government, the truth has never faced a greater foe. History can offer us few comparable examples of such an impressive and consistent state-led defiance of truth. The collective audacity to lie to…
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.
And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.
Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.
Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.
So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:
Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?
I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11!
Back in April of this year, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, stated, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
A question: can you declare that you are for freedom of speech/expression and ban, or maintain a ban, on a person from expressing himself in a purportedly public forum and preserve your integrity? Whether the new owner of Twitter, Musk, steadfastly stands on the principle of freedom of expression looks like it is about to be revealed.
One question is whether the former president Donald Trump will be allowed back onto the Twitter platform.
When Elon Musk met Donald Trump (Image credit: Mashable)
Musk was critical of Twitter’s ban of Trump. He called it a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”
A section of the corporate sector (obviously, the corporate sector is not a monolith, as Trump and Musk both belong to this sector) is threatening a boycott of its advertising dollar if Musk allows Trump back on Twitter. This has set the stage for what could turn out to be a showcase of corporate infighting.
Does one section of the corpocracy predominate? Politically, the answer would seem to be no. In the United States, the Democrats and Republicans represent two wings of the corpocracy that alternate between them in forming the government, with, what many would contend, is minimal separation politically.
USA Today, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the US, pointed the finger at Trump as the instigator behind the riot on Capitol Hill that led to him being banned from Twitter. This is an allegation — borne out by the panoply of media takes on the Capitol Hill riot and who is to blame. Allegations, however, do not carry the imprimatur of certitude.
While supporting the principle of freedom of speech/expression is fine in the abstract, it should not be an absolute. For instance, the 2004 Halifax Symposium on Media and Disinformation participants unanimously held disinformation to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. In a moral world, lies that cause death and suffering must not be condoned or given a deceitful, argumentative free pass.
So the billionaire Musk seemingly finds himself on the horns of a dilemma: losing money or losing face. Musk has a choice. He can give in to corporate blackmail and uphold the ban on Trump and preserve advertising revenue for Twitter or he can reinstate Trump and, at least on this measure, maintain his integrity.
Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube are failing to curb the spread of right-wing extremism and disinformation on their platforms and must immediately implement safeguards with the pivotal U.S. midterm elections less than two weeks away, a watchdog warned Thursday.
According to Free Press, “The problem is just as dire in advance of the 2022 U.S. midterms as it was during the nation’s 2020 elections.”
In particular, the report found that the major social media networks have:
Failed to clearly update their election integrity systems in time for the elections;
Created a labyrinth of company commitments, announcements, and policies that make it difficult to assess what they’re really doing, if anything, to protect users; and
Failed to close what they call “newsworthiness” or “public interest” exceptions that give prominent users and politicians a “get out of jail free” card and allow them to post lies without consequences from the platforms.
Free Press warned that these failures are likely to be felt not only at polling stations on November 8, “but also on the streets.”
“The unchecked spread of online lies about the 2020 election fueled real-world violence on January 6,” said Nora Benavidez, report author and senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press. “And although most people in the United States now believe that Big Tech should do more to curb the online spread of disinformation and incitements to violence, social media companies keep failing to protect users.”
As the report notes:
Change the Terms, a coalition of more than 60 civil and consumer rights organizations, developed a set of 15 priority reforms for social media companies to implement ahead of the midterm elections that would fight algorithmic amplification of hate and lies, protect users across all languages, and increase company transparency. Our coalition, of which Free Press is a founding member, then met with Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube throughout the summer of 2022, calling on each company to implement these 15 priority reforms as soon as possible and to share more data about their enforcement practices around election integrity.
[…]
Although tech companies had promised to fight disinformation and hate on their platforms this fall, there is a notable gap between what the companies say they want to do and what they actually do in practice. In sum, platforms do not have sufficient policies, practices, AI, or human capital in place to materially mitigate harm ahead of and during the November midterms.
“Even in writing, platforms like Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube can’t commit to the most basic online protections to limit the spread of disinformation and hate,” said Benavidez. “And in practice, our research shows ongoing gaps in companies’ enforcement of their own meager safety policies.”
“These are systemic failures across all of the major social media companies that show how little the companies care about safeguarding elections and fighting extremism and lies on their platforms,” she added.
After Twitter’s new mega-billionaire owner, Elon Musk, fired several of the platform’s key leaders immediately upon taking over on Thursday night, Benavidez warned that content moderation on the site is poised to become even worse.
Our new @freepress report out today found Twitter ranks in the bottom half of platform preparedness for midterms. Musk firing key leaders won’t limit toxic content & it won’t protect “free speech”. It’ll just engender fear & distrust in staff and make moderation harder. https://t.co/ItHXnYJo9q
Free Press urged Facebook parent company Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube to take the following steps to stem the spread of bigotry and lies on their platforms:
Stop amplifying hate and disinformation content and implement algorithms without discrimination;
Protect people equally around the world and across languages through increased resourcing for civic integrity teams year-round; and
Boost transparency about company business models and moderation and enforcement practices, ensuring access to data for external researchers and journalists.
“We are less than two weeks from the U.S. midterms,” Benavidez tweeted. “Over 30 other national elections have occurred around the world this year, featuring conspiracy theories and lies fanned by online rhetoric that social media companies allow to flourish.”
“What will it take for the culture of Big Tech to change?” she asked. “What will it take for civil and human rights to become a real priority with evidence to show for it?”
Those who hate Russia the most are the ones who embody everything they claim to hate about it: they’re all pro-war, pro-censorship, pro-propaganda, pro-trolling operations, and support Ukraine in banning political parties and opposition media. They are what they claim to hate.
Meanwhile those of us who oppose those things are told to “move to Russia”, even though we’re the ones advocating the supposed “western values” they claim to support while they’re doing everything they can to undermine them. They should move to Russia.
Western propaganda means people always oppose the last war but not the current war. The US provoking and sustaining its Ukraine proxy war is no more ethical than its invading of Iraq; it just looks that way due to propaganda. Ukraine isn’t the good war, it’s just the current war.
It is only by the copious amounts of propaganda our civilization is being hammered with that this is not immediately obvious to everyone. In the future (assuming we don’t annihilate ourselves first), the propaganda will have cleared from the air enough for people to see clearly and realize that they were lied to. Again.
The US indisputably deliberately provoked this war. The US is indisputably keeping this war going. The US indisputably benefits from this war while Ukrainians, Russians and Europeans get nothing but suffering from it. Empire apologists will admit to the latter in rare moments of honesty, as Matthew Yglesias recently did when he wrote the following:
The United States is using up a lot of military equipment in the war, but it’s being used for the purpose of destroying Russian military equipment. Since we were already fully committed to an anti-Russian military alliance, this is actually a really good deal for us. Basically, NATO equipment + Ukrainian lives are being traded for Russian equipment + Russian lives, which leaves NATO coming out ahead. That’s doubly true because NATO is much richer than Russia, so we win a long-term game of “everyone explode their weapons as fast as they can make them.”
Again, though, what makes that really true is that NATO material is killing Russian soldiers, while Russian material is killing Ukrainian soldiers. That’s a deal in our favor.
It’s easy to oppose the last war. It’s hard to oppose current wars as the propaganda machine is shoving them down our throats. Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts.
The fact that the White House is weighing a national security review of Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase because he’s perceived as having an “increasingly Russia-friendly stance” is an admission that the US government views large social media platforms as its own propaganda services.
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There is no one who can be trusted with the authority to determine what constitutes “disinformation” or “misinformation” on behalf of large numbers of people. This is because we are not impartial omniscient deities but highly fallible, biased humans with our own vested interests.
This fatal logical flaw in the burgeoning business of “fact checking” and “counter-disinformation” is self-evident at a glance, and it becomes even more glaring once you notice that all the major players involved in instituting and normalizing these practices have ties to status quo power.
The idea that someone needs to be in charge of deciding what’s true and false on behalf of the rank-and-file citizenry is becoming more and more widely accepted, and it’s plainly irrational. In practice it’s nothing other than a call to propagandize the public more aggressively. You might agree with their propaganda. The propagandists might believe they are being totally impartial and objective. But as long as they have any oligarchic or state backing, directly or indirectly, they are necessarily administering propaganda on behalf of the powerful.
Question the assumption that people saying wrong things to each other on the internet is a problem that needs to be fixed. People have always said wrong things to each other. Untruth has always existed. We’ve managed. It’s not a problem we should want the powerful to fix for us.
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A regime that points guns at people for wielding cameras is a regime that sees truth as a threat. https://t.co/SzHaDURKQR
Science should be the most collaborative endeavor in the world. Every scientist on earth should be collaborating and communicating. Instead, because of our competition-based models, it’s the exact opposite: scientific exploration is divided up into innovators competing against other innovators, corporations competing against other corporations, nations competing against other nations.
If we could see how much we are losing to these competition-based models, how much innovation is going unrealized, how much human thriving is being sacrificed, how we’re losing almost all of our brainpower potential to these models, we’d fall to our knees and scream with rage. If science had been a fully collaborative worldwide hive mind endeavor instead of divided and turned against itself for profit and military power, our civilization would be unimaginably more advanced than it is. This is doubtless. We gave up paradise to make a few bastards rich.
It’s not too late to have this, of course. We could still abandon our competition-based models for collaboration-based ones and create paradise on earth together; we’ve just got to want it badly enough as a species.
A collaboration-based society where everyone gets what they need wouldn’t just eliminate the inefficiencies and obstacles created by competition: it would free up the brainpower of our entire species to devote itself to innovation and discovery. As Stephen J Gould said, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Poverty, inequality, the patent system, the need to earn money to survive, corporate competition, corporate secrecy, competition between states, state secrecy, war, militarism; all these drainages leave us with a tiny fraction of our available scientific potential. Overcoming the existential roadblocks we’ve set up for ourselves in our near future is going to require a tremendous amount of brilliance, and we won’t have access to that brilliance until we become a conscious species and move from competition-based models to collaborative ones.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, buying an issue of my monthly zine, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.
For students of official propaganda, mind control, emotional coercion, and other insidious manipulation techniques, the rollout of the New Normal has been a bonanza. Never before have we been able to observe the application and effects of these powerful technologies in real-time on such a massive scale.
In a little over two and a half years, our collective “reality” has been radically revised. Our societies have been radically restructured. Millions (probably billions) of people have been systematically conditioned to believe a variety of patently ridiculous assertions, assertions based on absolutely nothing, repeatedly disproved by widely available evidence, but which have nevertheless attained the status of facts. An entire fictitious history has been written based on those baseless and ridiculous assertions. It will not be unwritten easily or quickly.
I am not going to waste your time debunking those assertions. They have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked. You know what they are and you either believe them or you don’t. Either way, reviewing and debunking them again isn’t going to change a thing.
Instead, I want to focus on one particularly effective mind-control technology, one that has done a lot of heavy lifting throughout the implementation of the New Normal and is doing a lot of heavy-lifting currently. I want to do that because many people mistakenly believe that mind-control is either (a) a “conspiracy theory” or (b) something that can only be achieved with drugs, microwaves, surgery, torture, or some other invasive physical means. Of course, there is a vast and well-documented history of the use of such invasive physical technologies (see, e.g., the history of the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program), but in many instances mind-control can be achieved through much less elaborate techniques.
One of the most basic and effective techniques that cults, totalitarian systems, and individuals with fascistic personalities use to disorient and control people’s minds is “gaslighting.” You’re probably familiar with the term. If not, here are a few definitions:
“the manipulation of another person into doubting their perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events.” American Psychological Association
“an insidious form of manipulation and psychological control. Victims of gaslighting are deliberately and systematically fed false information that leads them to question what they know to be true, often about themselves. They may end up doubting their memory, their perception, and even their sanity.” Psychology Today
“a form of psychological manipulation in which the abuser attempts to sow self-doubt and confusion in their victim’s mind. Typically, gaslighters are seeking to gain power and control over the other person, by distorting reality and forcing them to question their own judgment and intuition.” Newport Institute
The main goal of gaslighting is to confuse, coerce, and emotionally manipulate your victim into abandoning their own perception of reality and accepting whatever new “reality” you impose on them. Ultimately, you want to completely destroy their ability to trust their own perception, emotions, reasoning, and memory of historical events, and render them utterly dependent on you to tell them what is real and what “really” happened, and so on, and how they should be feeling about it.
Anyone who has ever experienced gaslighting in the context of an abusive relationship, or a cult, or a totalitarian system, or who has worked in a battered women’s shelter, can tell you how powerful and destructive it is. In the most extreme cases, the victims of gaslighting are entirely stripped of their sense of self and surrender their individual autonomy completely. Among the best-known and most dramatic examples are the Patty Hearst case, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the Manson family, and various other cults, but, the truth is, gaslighting happens every day, out of the spotlight of the media, in countless personal and professional relationships.
Since the Spring of 2020, we have been subjected to official gaslighting on an unprecedented scale. In a sense, the “Apocalyptic Pandemic” PSYOP has been one big extended gaslighting campaign (comprising countless individual instances of gaslighting) inflicted on the masses throughout the world. The events of this past week were just another example.
Basically, what happened was, a Pfizer executive confirmed to the European Parliament last Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its Covid “vaccine” prevented transmission of the virus before it was promoted as doing exactly that and forced on the masses in December of 2020. People saw the video of the executive admitting this, or heard about it, and got upset. They tweeted and Facebooked and posted videos of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Bill Gates, the Director of the CDC, official propagandists like Rachel Maddow, and various other “experts” and “authorities” blatantly lying to the public, promising people that getting “vaccinated” would “prevent transmission,” “protect other people from infection,” “stop the virus in its tracks,” and so on, which totally baseless assertions (i.e., lies) were the justification for the systematic segregation and persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” and the fomenting of mass fanatical hatred of anyone challenging the official “vaccine” narrative, and the official New Normal ideology, which hatred persists to this very day.
The New Normal propaganda apparatus (i.e., the corporate media, health “experts,” et al.) responded to the story predictably. They ignored it, hoping it would just go away. When it didn’t, they rolled out the “fact-checkers” (i.e., gaslighters).
The Associated Press, Reuters, PolitiFact, and other official gaslighting outfits immediately published lengthy official “fact-checks” that would make a sophist blush. Read them and you will see what I mean. They are perfect examples of official gaslighting, crafted to distract you from the point and suck you into an argument over meaningless details and definitions. They sound exactly like Holocaust deniers pathetically asserting that there is no written proof that Hitler ordered the Final Solution … which, there isn’t, but it doesn’t fucking matter. Of course, Hitler ordered the Final Solution, and, of course, they lied about the “vaccines.”
The Internet is swimming with evidence of their lies … tweets, videos, articles, and so on.
Which is what makes gaslighting so frustrating for people who believe they are engaged in an actual good-faith argument over facts and the truth. But that’s not how totalitarianism works. The New Normals, when they repeat whatever the authorities have instructed them to repeat today (e.g., “trust the Science,” “safe and effective,” “no one ever claimed they would prevent transmission”), could not care less whether it is actually true, or even if it makes the slightest sense.
These gaslighting “fact-checks” are not meant to convince them that anything is true or false. And they are certainly not meant to convince us. They are official scripts, talking points, and thought-terminating clichés for the New Normals to repeat, like cultists chanting mantras at you to shut off their minds and block out anything that contradicts or threatens the “reality” of the cult.
You can present them with the actual facts, and they will smile knowingly, and deny them to your face, and condescendingly mock you for not “seeing the truth.”
But here’s the tricky thing about gaslighting.
In order to effectively gaslight someone, you have be in a position of authority or wield some other form of power over them. They have to need something vital from you (i.e., sustenance, safety, financial security, community, career advancement, or just love). You can’t walk up to some random stranger on the street and start gaslighting them. They will laugh in your face.
The reason the New Normal authorities have been able to gaslight the masses so effectively is that most of the masses do need something from them … a job, food, shelter, money, security, status, their friends, a relationship, or whatever it is they’re not willing to risk by challenging those in power and their lies. Gaslighters, cultists, and power freaks, generally, know this. It is what they depend on, your unwillingness to live without whatever it is. They zero in on it and threaten you with the loss of it (sometimes consciously, sometimes just intuitively).
Gaslighting won’t work if you are willing to give up whatever the gaslighter is threatening to take from you (or stop giving you, as the case may be), but you have to be willing to actually lose it, because you will be punished for defending yourself, for not surrendering your autonomy and integrity, and conforming to the “reality” of the cult, or the abusive relationship, or the totalitarian system.
I have described the New Normal (i.e., our new “reality”) as pathologized-totalitarianism, and as a “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” I used the “Covidian Cult” analogy because every totalitarian system essentially operates like a cult, the main difference being that, in totalitarian systems, the balance of power between the cult and the normal (i.e., dominant) society is completely inverted. The cult becomes the dominant (i.e., “normal”) society, and non-cult-members become its “deviants.”
We do not want to see ourselves as “deviants” (because we haven’t changed, the society has), and our instinct is to reject the label, but that is exactly what we are … deviants. People who deviate from the norm, a new norm, which we reject, and oppose, but which, despite that, is nonetheless the norm, and thus we are going to be regarded and dealt with like deviants.
I am such a deviant. I have a feeling you are too. Under the circumstances, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, we need to accept it, and embrace it. Above all, we need to get clear about it, about where we stand in this new “reality.”
We are heading toward New Normal Winter No. 3. They are already cranking up the official propaganda, jacking up the fabricated “cases,” talking about reintroducing mask-mandates, fomenting mass hatred of “the Unvaccinated,” and so on. People’s gas bills are doubling and tripling. The global-capitalist ruling classes are openly embracing neo-Nazis. There is talk of “limited” nuclear war. Fanaticism, fear, and hatred abound. The gaslighting of the masses is not abating. It is increasing. The suppression of dissent is intensifying. The demonization of non-conformity is intensifying. Lines are being drawn in the sand. You see it and feel it just like I do.
Get clear on what’s essential to you. Get clear about what you’re willing to lose. Stay deviant. Stay frosty. This isn’t over.
New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.
An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.
In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.
The Mediasia “conversation” on Asia-Pacific issues in Kyoto, Japan. Image: Iafor screenshot APR
He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.
Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.
In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.
He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.
Paying a tribute to Pacific to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”
Challenges facing the Asia-Pacific media . . . La Trobe University’s Dr Nasya Bahfen and Asia Pacific Report’s Dr David Robie in conversation. Image: Iafor screenshot APR
The Truth Barrier
