radiofree.asia

Category: Disinformation

  • Free Press, Propaganda and Censorship

    In war, truth is the first casualty.

    — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)

    How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current list of adversaries, from the point of view of those adversaries? We supposedly pride ourselves on listening to both or many sides of an issue before forming an opinion (or, better still, a sound analysis). It’s the core of our system of justice, however flawed. It’s why we value free speech.

    It’s not that the viewpoints we commonly hear are not different from each other, or that we don’t hear from people with foreign accents from the parts of the world in question. It’s that mainstream news, information and analysis are from a very narrow spectrum. The differences in the viewpoints are in the details, not the fundamentals. In the case of Ukraine, for example, the differences are mainly about how, and how much, to support Ukraine, not whether to do so. Do we hear the Russian view that they were compelled to come to the rescue of Ukraine’s Russian population, which was being massacred by racist, pro-Nazi elements running the Ukrainian government and supported by NATO? Not from the mainstream news, we don’t.

    Similarly, when we hear from nationals of adversary countries, our media rarely offer space or air time to persons who represent the adversarial point of view. We are rather more likely to hear from exiles seeking to overthrow the government and hoping for western support. When have we heard from a representative of Hezbollah or Hamas? Or of the government of China or North Korea, or the Sandinista government of Nicaragua? The point is not whether their point of view is correct or whether we decide that it’s reasonable or not, but rather whether we even know what it is, and whether we try to understand it. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do in order to negotiate with our adversaries, solve our differences and achieve peace? The closest we come to that in our media is to invite such representatives to an on-air ambush where we browbeat them and shout them down instead of listening to them.

    But it’s worse than that. Our vaunted “free press” closes down the offices and facilities of journalists from countries or movements selected for vilification, and blocks their websites within the boundaries of our country. Thus, the Russian RT media channel and the Iranian Press TV, among others, are no longer permitted to operate within most western countries. Apparently, their words are considered hazardous to western ears. Similarly, many journalists and other individuals have found themselves banned from western-based social media for revealing unwelcome facts or contradicting official truth. Many have been banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms.

    It’s not just censorship, either. Our journalistic media have been taken over by advertising and PR principles, going so far as to fabricate stories and substitute lies for the truth on a massive scale. Even “fact checking” has become the province of distortion, where the “authorized” version of events has displaced actual facts.  The mainstream media remove journalists who tell too much truth, contradicting the lies. The New York Times “disappeared” war correspondent Chris Hedges for reporting on war crimes committed by Israel and similar news. Aaron Maté and Max Blumenthal used to report their investigative journalism on Democracy Now, which has now ceased inviting them, in order to become more of a mainstream outlet. Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersch migrated from The New Yorker and the New York Times to foreign media and eventually alternative outlets as his investigative journalism began to cast doubt on mainstream accounts of the Syrian war, the death of Osama Bin Laden, the destruction of the Nordstream gas pipelines and other events. Julian Assange is paying the highest price for publishing a modern-day equivalent of the Pentagon Papers, originally published by a younger, more courageous New York Times.

    Sadly, many members of the public consider themselves well-informed and openminded if they read the most prestigious U.S. newspapers, watch or listen to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, and subscribe to Asia Times. To the extent that this may have been true in the past, it no longer is. Today, the ownership and funding sources of the major news media are all oligarchs and powerful corporations. Their job is no longer to inform the public, but rather to inculcate them with whatever information and ideas will manufacture consent for the policies that the powerful wish to enact. And no more, please.

    This explains the actions of those who rule us, who are not just the elected leadership. In fact, even the elections themselves are limited to candidates selected by the powerful interests, and centered upon a few issues that do not threaten those interests (e.g. abortion and civil rights), and where the campaigning takes place almost exclusively in the few “swing” states that will determine the outcome of the election. As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

    If we want to be worthy of calling ourselves educated, we cannot depend solely upon the mainstream press; we will have to do a lot of the work ourselves. There is bias in all media, but we can expose ourselves to opposing biases in order to get a wider variety of facts and analyses, and form our views accordingly. We have choices, if we only seek them out. The biases of Yahoo and Google are different from those of Russian and Chinese search engines. If we don’t find what we’re looking for on one, we might find it on another. The same is true with social media. Telegram is becoming increasingly popular, especially with those who have been banned elsewhere. Substack.com is a website that thus far has accommodated most subjects and viewpoints. Many of the journalists who are less than welcome in the mainstream media can be found at serenashimaward.org, a project that rewards journalists who present alternate views and information (and for which I am proud to serve as Treasurer). Due diligence is worth the rewards.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Are in Collective Alexithymia

    No words for emotions — alexithymia

    New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.

    Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy and propaganda, and patriotism and a country of war war war abroad.

    The idea is we are collectively held by the toxic glue of retail disease, consumer society, throw-away philosophy — land theft, cultural appropriation, gunboat diplomacy, xenophobia, and after generations, we are here, in this moment, 2023, but it is so much worse.

    Maybe there were some discussions on a national level when the US fire bombed (napalmed) Tokyo, murdering civilians in our patriotic pyre. We knew which cities had ancient building practices of wood and paper and lacquer. Maybe there was some moral outrage over the murders at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Ahh, even now, the caveats — Over 50% of Tokyo’s industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city’s output in half. Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.

    It was the night of March 9 to 10, 1945. Most of Tokyo was asleep. This was despite the present risk of bombs dropping from the sky —after all, Japan had by then been engaged for four years in the conflict that became known as World War II.

    While in the midst of an uneasy slumber, the city’s residents were suddenly awoken. Flames engulfed their homes, shelters and streets. Panic set in. People sought cover where they could, many jumping into rivers in a bid to escape the savage heat.

    Some 100,000 people died that night, including children. Many burnt alive where they slept. The cause? Incendiary devices were used in the raid, and Tokyo — a city largely made of wood and paper at the time — ignited like a massive bonfire.

    Later, the world learned of Operation Meetinghouse, the code name of that night’s firebombing attack by the United States Army Air Forces on Tokyo.

    Look, I am around a lot of people, and I observe as well as talk and probe. Over time, say, since I was starting as a beat reporter at age 18, oh, in 1974, I have learned the collective trauma of victims outside the USA — Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras. And inside this place, all the domestic trauma, including on several reservations where I called aunts and uncles of friends my aunties and uncles.

    My mom was born in British Columbia, so I know personally that place’s extruded trauma on original peoples.

    Over time, just as a city reporter, beat cop reporter, and then more probing assignments, I saw and absorbed the trauma this society — this country’s ugly history has been laid bare but covered up well — and just getting under the nails of Memory of Fire in Latin America lends pause to the entire project of the Newest Project on the Latest American Century.

    In his book, Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books; May 25, 2009), Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano tells a history of the world through 600 brief stories of human adversity, focusing on people often ignored by history. Several passages of the book were read. The guest interviewer was John Dinges. They also discussed Mr. Galeano’s 1971 book, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, which Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave to President Obama during the Fifth Summit of the Americas in April 2009. They talked about Mr. Galeano’s life and career, including military regimes, book bans, and repression — Video.)

    All the winds of hell unleashed by the Anglo Franco American Germanic forebearers, well, here we are, halfway done with 2023, and we have a society so bad, so broken, so distracted, so traumatized, so checked out, so vapid, so dumbdowned, so heartless, so disconnected, so xenophobic, so patriotic, so miseducated, so misled, so screwed up by the snake oil of our times, and so propagandized and polluted physically, intellectually and spiritually, that a psychological descriptor for traumatized individuals fits the entire society (minus a few million).

    Alexithymia has been associated with various impairments, including difficulties in emotional processing, identifying facial expressions, and understanding and relating to the emotions of others. It is also considered a risk factor for psychopathologies such as affective disorders, self-injury, personality disorders, and eating disorders.

    Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections. (The paper, “Child Maltreatment and Alexithymia: A Meta-Analytic Review,” was authored by Julia Ditzer, Eileen Y. Wong, Rhea N. Modi, Maciej Behnke, James J. Gross, and Anat Talmon.)

    I’ll run another couple of paragraphs describing this research, and, yes, it focuses on child maltreatment, but to be honest, maltreatment is beyond the family and close relatives. Maltreatment is in the K12 school/prison system. The school to prison pipeline is one avenue of the mistreatment. But then, the school to Ivy League is another trauma. School to MBA program. School to military pipeline.

    It can be in the backgrounds of Blinken or Obama or Bush or Clinton or Trump or Biden, or for their children — maltreatment is the lies these men and their women have flooded our world with. The outright open killing and murdering of people we sanction, those we disturb because we do not like their governments, they are in a dulled and numbed emotional spectrum.

    Young adults going to war, sure, complex PTSD, but what about the destruction of war on the target countries, and the collective hell each generation that follows a war-torn country, what do they face?

    The victims are in trauma, and so are the victimizers’ citizens, the so-called electorate here which pays taxes for these killings are also in the trauma zone.

    Emotional abuse and emotional neglect are found to be the strongest predictors of adult alexithymia. These types of maltreatment, which are often more implicit and harder to recognize than physical or sexual abuse, can hinder the development of secure attachment between caregivers and children. Parlay this to the collective, the society at large, you know, it takes a society-village to raise a child. Look at this village, man, just look at the horrors unleashed in this VILLAGE.

    “Child maltreatment encompasses more than physical and sexual abuse; it also includes emotional abuse and neglect, which have profound and enduring consequences,” Ditzer told PsyPost. “Through my research, I found that difficulties identifying and expressing emotions are most likely in adults who experienced emotional abuse and neglect. This highlights the critical importance of how we communicate with children.”

    “I hope that readers are inspired to be more mindful of the messages we convey to our children through our words and the way we say them, as emotional abuse and neglect prevention can make a significant difference in children’s emotional well-being long-term. Generally, I hope to bring more attention to the topic of child maltreatment and its consequences.”

    Look, I was at a grand opening of a small wine tasting business in my small town yesterday. I met the woman opening it a year ago, and she told me her story — in foster youth, abused there big time, and then in an abusive relationship for 17 years, and she got her real estate license and she made some good moves and so she owns a duplex here which she rents and one in Tulum which she rents and she has this business.

    So, a 68-ish woman and I got into it waiting for the doors to open. I was talking to someone who asked what I was doing and what I was working on. I told them my work with homeless folk, civilians and veterans alike.

    This vacationing woman said she was a retired parole officer, and she point blank told me, “I have no sympathy for druggies. It was their choice. It is all their fault.”

    Talk about a trauma drenched and giving woman. I told her that was absurd, that every female veteran I worked with had been sexually assaulted by their own men in boot camp or sometimes overseas on duty. That many had injuries from absurd 20 mile hikes with 100 pound rucksacks on. Torn ligaments, protruding discs, and bad hip joints from parachuting.

    And she blithely said, “I guess it was time for me to retire. I have no empathy.”

    Retire, man, on our dime, and how long did she serve (sic) as a parole or probation officer, and how long did she just despise those criminals?

    Where do they get this attitude, and this is not an anomaly? Believe me, I have duked it out with people my entire late teens and through all of my adult life. This retrograde, this trauma flooded society, again, collectively, we can call it Stockholm Syndrome, relating and empathizing with your captor. Valorizing them. We do that daily.

    But this is emotional stunting, emotional victimizing, and eventually, a blindness to our humanity. And here we are, in 2023:

    The United States will be sending depleted uranium munitions (DU) to Ukraine, reported The Wall Street Journal on June 13. This was written three months after Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder stated March 21 that to his knowledge the U.S. would not do so. (Los Angeles Times, March 21)

    The announcement about sending DU munitions comes despite voluminous documentation about the devastating consequences of breathing in the radioactive dust caused by these weapons.

    So, wherever I go, this emotional deadness, literally translated as “no words for emotions” is the major virus of the world now. And it keeps growing, attacking man, woman and child. Numb, dead, well, it is deeper than that. Our government and our corporations and our churches and religious leaders, all the marketers, all the armies of cops and code inspectors and fine levelers and repossession experts and tax men and eviction experts and on and on, they have killed our collective emotional souls whereupon this new Tokyo fire bombing is now Ukrainian DU bombing.

    China has translated “Metal of Dishonor-Depleted Uranium,” a groundbreaking book compiled 25 years ago by the International Action Center (IAC) warning of the devastating consequences of deploying DU munitions. It couldn’t be more timely.

    The preface to the Chinese edition warns:

    Depleted uranium weapons are not only harmful to their targets, but also harmful to the soldiers who operate the weapons, civilians around depleted uranium — and even their descendants. It caused bodily harm and threatened the future natural environment [in countries where it was used].

    At the same time, this book calls for the joint boycott and abolition of depleted uranium weapons and the realization of interactive exchanges and peaceful coexistence on a global scale.

    There is so much disconnection to participatory and angry and direct action democracy that we have story after story telling us we can’t govern ourselves … until we are about to start a war in Venezuela, Cuba, China, and then into Russia. We are sick collectively:

    He should be shot, of course, because he is a rabid rat. Beyond repair. A serial killer on the loose, but because of the deadened heart and brain of the collective Westerner, this guy just appears as yet another abuser, to be respected, regarded well and listened to: Individuals with alexithymia often experience challenges in their interpersonal relationships, exhibiting limited socioaffective skills, decreased empathy, and a tendency to avoid close social connections.

    Hmm: why the world is criticizing the Biden administration for sending Ukraine these weapons:

    “Years or even decades later, they can kill adults and children who stumble on them.”

    Think about this, and you will understand how murdering Koreans in the 1950s was okay, then in Vietnam, then in Cambodia, then in Iraq, and then, well, name the country, and the USA has its hands on the killing machine and coup creating throttle. All that is okay, right? With Kissinger at 100 getting his next year of fame in interview after interview (sic — they are not real journalistic interviews, I have you know), how can a society collectively even move forward with a war criminal now giving sage advice?

    This is 2023, and even children are not respected in this so-called Shining City on the Hill:

    An aged Native-American chieftain was visiting New York City for the first time in 1906. He was curious about the city and the city was curious about him. A magazine reporter asked the chief what most surprised him in his travels around town.

    “Little children working,” the visitor replied.

    Child labor might have shocked that outsider, but it was all too commonplace then across urban, industrial America (and on farms where it had been customary for centuries). In more recent times, however, it’s become a far rarer sight. Law and custom, most of us assume, drove it to near extinction. And our reaction to seeing it reappear might resemble that chief’s — shock, disbelief.

    But we better get used to it, since child labor is making a comeback with a vengeance. A striking number of lawmakers are undertaking concerted efforts to weaken or repeal statutes that have long prevented (or at least seriously inhibited) the possibility of exploiting children.

    Take a breath and consider this: the number of kids at work in the U.S. increased by 37% between 2015 and 2022. During the last two years, 14 states have either introduced or enacted legislation rolling back regulations that governed the number of hours children can be employed, lowered the restrictions on dangerous work, and legalized subminimum wages for youths.

    Iowa now allows those as young as 14 to work in industrial laundries. At age 16, they can take jobs in roofing, construction, excavation, and demolition and can operate power-driven machinery. Fourteen-year-olds can now even work night shifts and once they hit 15 can join assembly lines. All of this was, of course, prohibited not so long ago. (source)

    Do you need to go back into Anglo Saxon history? Dickens anyone?

    Do you need a lesson on capitalism and exploitation? Now, this history, this collective thinking and collective subconsciousness, this alternative way of being a human being, it is part of the abuse, from cradle to school to job to grave:

    Hard work, moreover, had long been considered by those in the British upper classes who didn’t have to do so as a spiritual tonic that would rein in the unruly impulses of the lower orders.  An Elizabethan law of 1575 provided public money to employ children as “a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers.”

    By the eighteenth century, the philosopher John Locke, then a celebrated champion of liberty, was arguing that three-year-olds should be included in the labor force. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was happy that “children after four or five years of age could every one earn their own bread.” Later, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, would opt for four, since otherwise, society would suffer the loss of “precious years in which nothing is done! Nothing for Industry! Nothing for improvement, moral or intellectual.”

    American “founding father” Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on Manufacturing noted that children “who would otherwise be idle” could instead become a source of cheap labor. And such claims that working at an early age warded off the social dangers of “idleness and degeneracy” remained a fixture of elite ideology well into the modern era. Indeed, it evidently remains so today.

    When industrialization began in earnest during the first half of the nineteenth century, observers noted that work in the new factories (especially textile mills) was “better done by little girls of 6-12 years old.” By 1820, children accounted for 40% of the mill workers in three New England states. In that same year, children under 15 made up 23% of the manufacturing labor force and as much as 50% of the production of cotton textiles. (source)

    Here we are, in constant upheaval, constant fight-flight-freeze-cower-forget-trauma-fear-hate-disappear. The emotions, that is, after two, four, six generations have disappeared on the normal human spectrum. No words for emotions, man.

    May be an image of artillery and text

    May be an image of artillery, military uniform and text

    [Photo: This is what fascism and brown shirts look like.}

    Zelensky returned home with five Azov commanders, who were initially taken prisoner by Moscow during a months-long battle to defend the port city of Mariupol.

    May be an image of 7 people

    Today it is still a challenge for the European Union and Spain in particular to carry out effectively the management of sub-Saharan migration, as promised. It is necessary that its humanitarian projection be comprehensive and safe.

    A study published in the Informing Humanitarians Worldwide, deconstructs the vision of Africa as a continent of mass displacement and international migration.

    The report explains that the largest migratory flow in Africa is between countries on the same continent. According to the International Agency for Migrations IOM, only 14 percent of the planet’s migrants were born in Africa. 53 percent of African migration is within the same continent, only 26 percent goes to Europe. Africa, then, is characterized more by being a continent of internal refugees than international migration.

    May be an image of raft and ocean

    The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.

    Poverty and Crisis: Sucking Humanity Dry

    The lack of drinking water in Montevideo, “the first case in the world of a capital city that reached such a situation of collapse”. The daily dilemmas in the metropolitan area: what is said in the street and at the fair. The difference between the “water emergency” announced by President Lacalle Pou, and the ongoing environmental, sanitary and economic crisis. The impacts on people at risk, and on inequality among those who cannot afford the essentials. With fresh water reserves at 2%, with no drinking water at the taps, the chronicler says: “We crossed day zero without knowing it.”

    “Coffee with water without salt, coffee with fresh water”, shouted the street vendor at the Tristán Narvaja fair on Sunday. (source)

    May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text that says 'No ES, SEQUIA SAQUEO! Es'

    It is so much, so much maltreatment, in the womb, then carried through the air, both the digital waves and air ways. It is the pain of the rich shitting on us, and after generations of this, we are seeing more and more people unable to conjure up what should be ire, disrepect, hate, disgust, denigration, murderous thoughts heaped upon those killers of the likes of a (F)uckerberg or Fink or any number of millions of millionaires and all the 3,000 billionaires. This is how these people beat the populations down:

    While advocating for police abolition in his philanthropic efforts, Zuckerberg takes a different stance when it comes to his personal security.

    Meta corporate disclosures show that the Facebook parent company has provided extraordinary levels of personal security protections for its leading officers. Zuckerberg received $13.4 million in personal security costs in 2020, then $15.1 million in 2021, followed by $14.8 million last year, for a total of $43.4 million in security costs over the last three years.

    The funds, the disclosure noted, are used for “security personnel” guarding Zuckerberg and the “procurement, installation, and maintenance of certain security measures for his residences.”

    May be an image of 1 person, suit, microphone, dinner jacket and text

    So, his schizophrenia (it is about messing with the sheeple’s minds) just leaves most young people pummeled.

    The tech tycoon’s company has spent more than $40 million on Zuckerberg’s personal security over the past three years — while at the same time his family-run foundation has donated millions of dollars to groups that want to defund or even abolish the police.

    Since 2020, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has donated $3 million to PolicyLink, the organization behind DefundPolice.org, according to investigative reporter Lee Fang.

    The anti-cop group boasts on its website that it funds efforts to “diminish the role of policing in communities, and empower alternative visions for public safety,” though it fails to list what those substitutes may be.

    CZI, which Zuckerberg founded with wife Priscilla Chan, has also donated more than $2.5 million to Solidaire, Fang reported, which seeks to do away with policing.(source)

    If you recognize this in yourself, a friend, a loved one, then you get what is coming: affective disorders, nonsuicidal self-injury), personality disorders, and eating disorders. Moreover, the consequences of alexithymics’ emotional deficits extend beyond intrapersonal difficulties. Alexithymia interferes with individuals’ interpersonal relationships as they exhibit shortcomings in understanding and relating not only to their own emotions but also to the emotions of others. (source)

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Weaponised Antisemitism Crushed the Political Left:  Now it’s the Cultural Left’s Turn

    What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.

    We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.

    And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.

    And yet, the list of those supposedly exposed as antisemites – often only by association – keeps widening to include ever more unlikely targets.

    That is especially true in the Labour Party, where even the vaguest ties with any of the three iconic left-wing figures noted above – Jeremy Corbyn, Roger Waters and Ken Loach – can be grounds for disciplinary action.

    One of the Labour Party’s most successful politicians, Jamie Driscoll, North of Tyne mayor, was barred last month from standing for re-election after he shared a platform with Loach to talk about the North’s place in the director’s films.

    Not coincidentally, Driscoll has been described as “the UK’s most powerful Corbynista” – or supporter of Corbyn’s left-wing policies. The nadir in this process may have been reached at the Glastonbury Festival.

    Back in 2017, Corbyn, then-Labour leader, was given top billing as he set out a new, inspirational vision for Britain. Six years on and organisers cancelled the screening of a film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, highlighting the sustained campaign to smear Corbyn as an antisemite and snuff out his left-wing agenda.

    The decision was taken after pro-Israel pressure groups launched a campaign to smear the film as antisemitic. The festival decided showing it would cause “division”.

    So what is going on?

    To understand how we arrived at this dark moment, one in which seemingly anyone or anything can be cancelled as antisemitic, it is necessary to grapple with the term’s constantly mutating meaning – and the political uses this confusion is being put to.

    A huge irony

    A few decades ago, an answer to the question of what constituted antisemitism would have been straightforward. It was prejudice, hatred or violence towards a specific ethnic group. It was a form of racism directed against Jews because they were Jews.

    Antisemitism came in different guises: from brazen, intentional hostility, on the one hand, to informal, unthinking bias, on the other. Its expressions varied in seriousness too: from neo-Nazi marches down the high street to an assumption that Jews are more interested in money than other people.

    But that certainty gradually eroded. Some 20 years or so ago, antisemitism began to encompass not just hostility to an ethnic group, Jews, but opposition to a political movement, Zionism.

    There was a huge irony.

    Zionism is an ideology, one championed by Jews and non-Jews, that demands either exclusive or superior territorial and political rights for mostly Jewish immigrants to a region of the Middle East inhabited by a native population, the Palestinians.

    The key premise of Zionism, though rarely stated explicitly, is that non-Jews are inherently susceptible to antisemitism. According to Zionist ideology, Jews therefore need to live apart to ensure their own safety, even if that comes at the cost of oppressing non-Jewish groups.

    Zionism’s progeny is the self-declared “Jewish state” of Israel, created in 1948 with bountiful assistance from the imperial powers of the time, especially Britain.

    Israel’s establishment as a Jewish state required the ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The small number who managed to stay inside the new state were herded or caged into reservations, much as happened to Native Americans.

    Racial hierarchies

    None of this should be surprising. Zionism emerged more than a century ago in a colonialist Europe very much imbued with ideas of racial hierarchies.

    Simply put, Israel’s founders aspired to mirror those ideas and apply them in ways that benefitted Jews.

    Just as European nations viewed Jews as inferior and a threat to racial purity, Zionists regarded Palestinians and Arabs as inferior and endangering their own racial purity.

    It is only once one understands Zionism’s inbuilt and systematic racism that it becomes clear why Israel has shown itself not just unwilling but incapable of making peace with the Palestinians. Which, in turn, helps to explain the recent evolution in antisemitism’s meaning.

    After Israel collapsed the Oslo peace talks in 2000 to prevent a state for Palestinians being established on a sliver of their former homeland, the Palestinians launched an uprising, or intifada, that Israel brutally subdued.

    Israel’s crushing of the Palestinians’ fight for self-determination coincided with the arrival of new, digital kinds of media that made concealing the cruelty of Israel’s repression much harder than before.

    For the first time, western publics were exposed to the idea that Israel and the ideology that underpinned it, Zionism, might be more problematic than they had been encouraged to believe.

    The romantic illusions about Israel as a simple refuge for Jews started to unravel.

    That culminated in a series of reports by leading human rights groups in recent years characterising Israel as an apartheid state. Israel’s supporters, however, whether Jews or non-Jews, have struggled to acknowledge the ugly, anachronistic ideas of race, apartheid and colonialism at the heart of a project they were raised to support since childhood.

    Instead they preferred to expand the meaning of antisemitism to excuse Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians.

    So in parallel to Israel’s crushing of the Palestinian uprising, its apologists intensified the blurring of the distinction between hostility towards Jews and opposition to Israel and Zionism.

    They began a campaign to redefine antisemitism so that it treated Israel as a kind of “collective Jew”.

    In this new, perverse way of thinking, anyone who opposed Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians was as antisemitic as someone who marched down the high street shouting anti-Jewish slogans.

    Antagonism to Israel was denied the right to present itself as evidence of anti-racism, or support for Palestinian rights.

    Colonial meddling

    This evolution culminated in the adoption by a growing number of governments and official bodies of an entirely new, and extraordinary, definition of antisemitism that prioritised opposition to Israel over hatred towards Jews.

    Seven of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 11 examples of antisemitism focus on Israel. The most problematic is the claim that it is antisemitic to argue Israel is “a racist endeavour”.

    That view has been a staple of anti-racist, socialist thought for decades, as well as serving for 16 years as the basis of a United Nations resolution.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Israel took a pivotal role behind the scenes in formulating the IHRA definition.

    The new definition might have gained little traction, but for two key factors.

    One was that it was not just Zionists who had an interest in protecting Israel from scrutiny or serious criticism. For the West, Israel was the lynch pin for projecting its military power into the oil-rich Middle East.

    The benefits the West received from that power projection – continuing colonial meddling in the region – could be disguised, too, by directing attention at Israel and away from the West’s guiding hand.

    Better still, the backlash against Israel’s role inflaming the Middle East could be stifled by labelling any critic as antisemitic. It was the West’s perfect cover story and the ideal silencing tool all wrapped up in one smear.

    The second factor was Corbyn’s explosion onto the political scene in 2015, and his near-miss two years later in a general election, when he won the biggest increase in votes for Labour since 1945. He was 2,000 votes shy of winning.

    Corbyn’s unexpected success – against all odds – sharply underscored the urgent, shared interests of the British establishment and the Zionist movement.

    A Corbyn government would curb the privileges of a ruling elite; it would threaten the West’s colonial war machine, Nato; and it would seek to end the UK’s military and diplomatic support for Israel, the West’s key ally in the Middle East.

    After the 2017 election, no effort was spared by the political establishment – by the government, by the media, by Labour’s right wing, and by pro-Israel groups – to constantly suggest that Corbyn and the hundreds of thousands of new left-wing Labour party members he attracted were antisemitic.

    Under mounting media pressure, the IHRA definition was foisted on the party in autumn 2018, creating a trap into which the left was bound to fall every time it took a principled stance on Israel and human rights.

    Even the chief author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, warned it was being “weaponised” to silence critics of Israel.

    The antisemitism campaign sapped Corbyn’s campaign of energy and momentum for the 2019 general election. The once-inspiring left-wing leader was forced into a permanent  posture of defensiveness and evasiveness.

    Purge of members

    Corbyn was ousted from the Labour benches in 2020 by his successor, Keir Starmer, who had been elected leader on the promise of bringing unity.

    He did the opposite.

    He waged a war on the party’s left wing. Corbyn’s few allies in the shadow cabinet were driven out.  Then, Starmer’s team began a relentless, high-profile purge of the party’s Corbyn-supporting members, including anti-Zionist Jews, under the claim they were antisemitic.

    Debate about the purges was banned in local constituencies, on the grounds that it might make “Jewish members” – really meaning Israel’s apologists – feel unsafe.

    This process reached a new level of surrealism with the barring last month of the popular figure of Jamie Driscoll, the first mayor of North of Tyne, from standing for re-election on a socialist platform.

    Driscoll had embarrassed Starmer’s officials by proving that running society for the benefit of all could be a vote-winner. He needed to be neutered. The question was how that could be achieved without making it clear that Starmer was really waging a war not on antisemitism but on the left.

    So a set of tendentious associations with antisemitism were manufactured to justify the decision.

    Driscoll was punished not for saying or doing anything antisemitic – even under the new, expanded IHRA definition – but for sharing a platform to discuss director Ken Loach’s films. Loach, it should be noted, had not been expelled from the party for antisemitism.

    Loach’s expulsion in 2021 had been justified on the grounds he had accused Starmer’s officials of carrying out a witch hunt against the party’s left. Loach’s treatment thereby proved the very allegation he was expelled for making.

    But to bolster the feeble pretext for targeting Driscoll, which even in the official version was entirely unconnected to antisemitism, media organisations ignored the stated grounds of Loach’s expulsion. They emphasised instead fanciful claims that the director had been caught denying the Holocaust.

    Not only was Driscoll barred from running again as mayor, but, according to reports, any mention of his name can lead to disciplinary action. He has become, in a terrifying phrase from George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, an “Unperson”.

    In parallel, Starmer has overseen the rush by the party back into the arms of the establishment. He has ostentatiously embraced patriotism and the flag. He demands lockstep support for Nato. Labour policy is once again in thrall to big business, and against strikes by workers. And, since the death of the Queen, Starmer has sought to bow as low as possible before the new king without toppling over.

    His whole approach seems designed to foster an atmosphere of despair on the left. At the weekend, in a sign of how quickly the purges are expanding, it emerged that the Starmer police had been knocking at the door of a figure close to the party establishment, Gordon Brown’s former speechwriter Neal Lawson.

    Cultural dissent

    None of this is surprising. Labour, under Corbyn, was the one holdout against the complete takeover of British politics by neoliberal, predatory capitalist orthodoxy. His socialism-lite was an all-too-obvious aberration.

    Now, under Starmer, that political threat has been swept away.

    There is a bipartisan – meaning establishment – consensus. The UK government voted last night to ban all public bodies, including local governments, from approving a boycott of one country over its record of human rights abuses: Israel.

    The legislation will effectively protect Israel from boycotts even of products from Jewish settlements, built illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to drive Palestinians off their historic homeland.

    Michael Gove, the communities secretary, argued in the Commons debate that such practical expressions of solidarity with Palestinians would “harm community cohesion and fuel antisemitism” in Britain.

    The government appears to believe that only the sensitivities of the more extreme Zionist elements within the UK’s Jewish community need protecting, not those of British Palestinians, British Arabs or Britons who care about international law.

    Starmer’s party, which shares the government’s hostility to boycotts of Israel, whipped Labour MPs to abstain on the bill, allowing it to pass. It was left to a handful of Tory MPs to highlight the fact that the bill undermines the two-state solution that the government and Labour party pay lip service to.

    Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the bill “essentially gives exceptional impunity to Israel”.

    Speaking for Labour,  Lisa Nandy referred to boycotts of Israel as a “problem” that needed to be “tackled”, and instead urged amendments to the legislation to soften the bill’s draconian powers to fine public bodies.

    Starmer’s Labour eased the bill’s passage even as Israel launched yesterday the largest assault on the West Bank in 20 years. At least 10 Palestinians were killed in the initial attack on Jenin and more than 100 injured, while thousands fled their city.

    On Tuesday, the United Nations said it was “alarmed” by the scale of Israel’s assault on Jenin.

    The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, reported that the Israeli army was preventing first responders from reaching and treating the wounded.

    With all political dissent on Israel crushed, what is left now are small islands of cultural dissent, represented most visibly by a handful of ageing giants of the arts scene.

    Figures like Loach and Roger Waters are leftovers from a different era, one in which being a socialist was not equated with being antisemitic.

    Loach was a thorn in Starmer’s side because he made waves from within Labour.

    But the scope of Starmer’s ambition to eviscerate the UK’s cultural left too was highlighted last month when he wrote to the Jewish body, the Board of Deputies, to accuse Waters – in entirely gratuitous fashion – of “spreading deeply troubling antisemitism”.

    The last fires

    In a further sign of his authoritarian instincts, Starmer called for the musician’s concerts to be banned.

    Evidence for Waters’ supposed antisemitism is as non-existent as the earlier claim that Jew hatred had become a “cancer” under Corbyn. And it is the same establishment groups defaming Waters who smeared Corbyn: the government, the corporate media, Starmer’s wing of Labour, and the Israel lobby.

    Waters has been widely denounced for briefly dressing up in a Nazi-style uniform during his shows, as he has been doing for 40 years, in a clear satire on the attraction and dangers of fascist leaders.

    No one took an interest in his shows’ political messaging until it became necessary to weaponise antisemitism against the cultural left, having already eliminated the political left.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is an outspoken and high-profile supporter of Palestinian rights. Like Corbyn, Waters is noisily and unfashionably anti-war, including critical of Nato’s efforts to use Ukraine as a battlefield on which to “weaken” Russia rather than engage in talks.

    Like Corbyn, Waters is a critic of capitalist excess and a proponent of a fairer, kinder society of the kind expunged from most people’s memories.

    And like Corbyn, and very much unlike our current breed of charisma-free, technocratic politicians, Waters can draw huge crowds and inspire them with a political message.

    In Britain’s current, twisted political climate, anyone with a conscience, anyone with compassion, anyone with a sense of injustice – and anyone capable of grasping the hypocrisy of our current leaders – risks being smeared as an antisemite.

    That campaign is far from complete yet. It will continue until the very last fires of political dissent have been extinguished.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • New misinformation laws could be ‘abused’: Meta

    Misinformation laws proposed by the Albanese government to hold social media platforms to account for harmful content on their platforms could inadvertently be “abused” to the detriment of free speech, according to Facebook parent company Meta. Fronting a parliamentary inquiry on Tuesday, local policy representatives from the company raised early concerns with the draft legislation…

    The post New misinformation laws could be ‘abused’: Meta appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Trade Reciprocity

    China recently passed the Foreign Relations Law, which lays out foreign policy with an aim to “multipolarity.” The West is freaking out about it saying that it is a power grab. We have a guest to break down the anti-China rhetoric today. Carl Zha is the host of the “Silk and Steel Podcast” focusing on China, history, culture and politics. He explains how this is a reaction to Western sanctions and why the West is having a fit about it.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fear and Loathing in the City of Westminster

    Our descent into City Airport was like the drop-ship scene in the movie Aliens. The BA CityFlyer Embraer 190, a narrow-body twin-engine airliner, rolled over into a 40-degree bank and started bucking like a mechanical bull. Simulated “chimes” began chiming frantically. Flight attendants bolted for their seats. The German businessman in the seat beside me, obviously a nervous flyer, immediately adopted the “brace” position. I gripped his shoulder reassuringly and shouted into his ear like a drunken redneck, “WE’RE ON AN EXPRESS ELEVATOR TO HELL! GOING DOWN!”

    And so began my latest trip to London. This time, I wasn’t there to talk to “the Left” or to hunt down endoparasitoid xenomorphs. I was there on Serious Conspiracy Theorist Business, which I explained to the chirpy MI6 operative posing as a “survey taker” that followed me out of Border Control asking questions about my “nation of residence” and my “experience with the passport scanners,” and so on. She was wearing one of those rubber “Mission Impossible” masks that made her look like a middle-aged British woman. I waited for an opportunity, head faked, juked right, and lost her in the crowd. As I entered the “Arrivals” lobby, I turned and shouted in her general direction, “NOT MY FIRST RODEO, MR. PHELPS!”

    I don’t know what was up with all the shouting. I’ve been experimenting with different types of medication for this sinus condition I’ve had for months. My Sinus Specialist diagnosed me with “long” or possibly “permanent Covid,” or some yet-to-be-named debilitating syndrome caused by some other bio-weapon that produces cold-and-flu-like symptoms and has a survival rate of 99.8 percent. So, maybe it was bad reaction to my meds. Whatever it was, I was feeling jumpy.

    And the climate-change apocalypse didn’t help. Emerging from the Tube in Westminster was like walking into an enormous open-air sauna. Bodies were lying all around on the sidewalks. AFP photographers in hazmat suits were taking pictures of the carnage. Herds of corpulent American tourists staggered through the streets in semi-fugue states sweating profusely and thumbing their phones like an invasion of alien albino hippos trying to call up to their UAPs and arrange for immediate emergency extraction. I pushed and shoved and elbowed my way down Tothill Street to my pod hotel, checked in, and proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the maze of identical Kubrickian hallways that eventually led me to my luxury pod, and cleaned myself up for the night’s festivities.

    What was I doing back in London in the middle of a heat wave? Well … OK, I’m allowed to tell you about it now. As you are probably aware, Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Russell Brand were doing this public event last Thursday …

    … but that’s not what I was really there for.

    Not that the Thursday event wasn’t fun. It was. Despite the rather pricey tickets, there was a good size house and spirits were high. Russell Brand was in top form, pouring out torrents of intellectual free-association like an English Neal Cassady and nailing the punchlines of all the jokes. Michael was also firing on all cylinders. He worked the house like a seasoned politician, whipping the crowd into a veritable frenzy of anti-totalitarian fervor. Stella Assange took the stage at one point and briefed us on the official crucifixion of her husband, which, sadly, now looks like a fait accompli. Matt, who had just made it to London that morning, and so was jet-lagged and delieriously sleep-deprived, dispensed with the speech he had rewritten on the plane, and just winged it, and somehow pulled it off … because that, as they say, is show biz.

    Here’s the money part of Matt’s speech, which he paraphrased in London (emphasis mine):

    What Michael and I were looking at was something new, an Internet-age approach to political control that uses brute digital force to alter reality itself. We certainly saw plenty of examples of censorship and de-platforming and government collaboration in those efforts. However, it’s clear that the idea behind the sweeping system of digital surveillance combined with thousands or even millions of subtle rewards and punishments built into the online experience, is to condition people to censor themselves.

    Early the next morning, Michael, Matt, and a secret cabal of international journalists, editors, organizers, political satirists, academics, and other Very Serious People whose names I am not at liberty to mention gathered in an undisclosed location and spent the better part of the day sharing harmful misinformation and strategizing about how to defeat (or marginally disrupt) the network of governments, Intelligence agencies, global corporations, NGOs, and so-called disinformation experts known as the Censorship Industrial Complex. There were delegates from the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and other nominally sovereign countries.

    This heretofore clandestine meeting was conducted in what appeared to be a WWII-era air-raid shelter that had been converted into a private BDSM club under military-level OPSEC protocols (i.e., the meeting was conducted according to the protocols, not the architectural conversion). I’m not entirely sure why that was. We weren’t doing anything even remotely illegal. However, given that I’m under criminal investigation here in Germany for tweeting the cover art of my book, and the IRS’s sudden interest in Matt, and Kit Klarenberg’s recent experience in Luton, perhaps the abundance of caution was warranted. The last thing we needed was the UK Thought Police goose-stepping in like Basil Fawlty and dragging everyone off to Room 101.

    Anyway, that’s what I was actually there for. I had never met most of the people in attendance, except online on the double-encrypted Russian-backed dark-web conspiracy-theorist channels where we hatch our right-wing-extremist plots to defend people’s rights to freedom-of-speech and engage in other harmful anti-Democracy behaviors. I’m still not sure who I actually met in London, as we were all wearing identical Mickey-Mouse masks and speaking through portable voice modifiers. (In any secret meeting like this, you have to assume you’ve been infiltrated!)

    After the obligatory arguing about the agenda, we settled in and shared our country reports, which, unsurprisingly, were all variations on a theme. I won’t go into all the details. Michael Shellenberger’s non-profit has been tracking those developments. Matt Taibbi and Racket News are reporting it. Other alternative media outlets are reporting it. Millions of people all around the world are talking about it, writing about it, and arguing with each other about it. Your Twitter feed is probably full of it. Alex Gutentag just published a huge article about it.

    So, what is it, exactly, that is going on?

    The thing that was horrifying about listening to my colleagues reporting on the state of things in their countries — or, rather, the thing that should be horrifying but is becoming a mundane fact of life — is that more or less the same totalitarian program is being rolled out in countries throughout the world. The censorship. The official propaganda. The criminalization of dissent. The pathologization of dissent. The manipulation of our perception of reality. The coordinated transformation of the world into a smiley-faced neo-Orwellian police state in which politics no longer matters because society has been divided into two basic classes; i.e., “the normals,” who are prepared to mindlessly follow orders and parrot whatever official propaganda they are fed, and “the deviants,” or “extremists,” who are not.

    Seriously, all satire aside, think about the implications of that.

    As you sit there in whichever nominally sovereign country you’re sitting there reading this in, ask yourself, “how and why is this happening?” Then ask yourself, “why is it happening now?”

    If you do not have answers to those questions, it might behoove you to attempt to come up with some. That is basically what I’ve been trying to do — in a satirical and sometimes not so satirical manner — in these Consent Factory essays for the last seven years. I’m not going to summarize it all again here. I’ve done that, repeatedly, in my essays and books. I did it the last time I visited London to give a talk at the Real Left Conference.

    I did it again at this gathering in London. It did not go over all that well.

    The thing is, most of us are so laser-focused on the trees that we cannot see the forest. But our adversaries see the forest. They see the forest like fucking eagles. They own the fucking forest and everything in it. While we hop like squirrels from tree to tree, distracted from distraction by distraction, from limited hangout by limited hangout, they are building a big fucking fence around it and deploying the Forest-Ranger Sturmabteilung.

    I’m reminded of that infamous Karl Rove quote. He was referring to the USA, of course, but it was GloboCap (i.e., the Corporatocracy) that he was really speaking for whether he knew it or not …

    That’s not the way the world really works anymore … we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.  [The New York Times Magazine]

    If we do not want to end up “studying that reality,” the global, pathologized-totalitarian reality that is being subtly and not so subtly implemented simultaneously in countries throughout the world, at some point we had better come up with some actual answers to those questions above.

    The supranational, globally-hegemonic, post-ideological system of power that runs our world — whatever you need to call it — has answers to those questions. It has a story. It is a story about a beneficent global empire governed by authoritative scientific experts who are trying to save the world from Whatever and protect everyone from “disinformation” and “harmful” speech, ideas, and so on. Like every good story, it has an antagonist. Us. We are the official enemy. Right, Left, libertarian, anarchist, Islamic fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalist … it does not make one iota of difference. There is only the Empire, and those who oppose it. The Empire does not give a shit why. It is conducting a global “Clear-and-Hold” operation, wiping out internal resistance and establishing ideological uniformity. It could not care less what you think you believe in. All it wants is mindless obedience and rote repetition of its propaganda. That’s how totalitarianism works.

    And there I go with my story again. If anyone has a different story that makes sense of the last seven years — and arguably the last 30 years — honestly, I would love to hear it. My story fills me with fear and loathing, but the only other coherent story I’m hearing at the moment is the Empire’s story, and I think we all know how that one ends.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Glastonbury’s Cancelling of a Powerful Film about Jeremy Corbyn

    The Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko famously said that: ‘When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.’

    In this country, as in other western ‘democracies’, important truths are effectively being silenced. As we have written on many occasions, antisemitism was used as a weapon to destroy the chances of Jeremy Corbyn becoming the British Prime Minister. Labour HQ staffers, and even Labour MPs, actively conspired against him. Al Jazeera’s powerful series, The Labour Files, which was blatantly blanked by the establishment media, has documented all this in considerable detail.

    And now the Glastonbury Film Festival has succumbed to similar pressure and cancelled a screening of a new film, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie.

    The Board of Deputies of British Jews (BDBJ), a right-wing establishment organisation that claims to represent the British Jewish ‘community’, had written to Glastonbury organisers Michael and Emily Eavis, saying it would be ‘profoundly sinister’ if the festival platformed the film. Marie van der Zyl, president of BDBJ, said in a letter to the festival organisers:

    ‘It seems profoundly sinister for it to be providing a platform to a film which clearly seeks to indoctrinate people into believing a conspiracy theory effectively aimed at Jewish organisations.

    ‘We would request that you not allow your festival to be hijacked by those seeking to promote hatred with no basis in fact, in the same way as we would hope that your festival would not screen films seeking to promote other conspiracy theories, such as anti-vaccination, 9/11 truthers or chemtrails.’

    The makers of the film, first shown in London in February, describe the film thus:

    ‘Produced by award-winning radical film-maker Platform Films, with contributions from Jackie Walker, Ken Loach, Andrew Murray, Graham Bash and Moshe Machover, and narrated by Alexei Sayle, this feature-length documentary film explores a dark and murky story of political deceit and outrageous antisemitic smears. It also uncovers the critical role played by current Labour leader, Keir Starmer and asks if the movement which backed Corbyn could rise again.’

    Reviewer Diane Datson wrote:

    ‘The real message conveyed in this film is that the Labour Party is no alternative to the Conservatives – it serves the ruling class and is led by someone every bit as devious as Boris Johnson, if not more so.’

    She added:

    ‘However, I for one felt uplifted, as the film ended optimistically. Many of the interviewees think that all is not lost – those millions of people who were inspired and given hope by the Corbyn project haven’t gone away – they are to be found supporting the picket lines, protesting and fighting for many causes such as public ownership of the NHS and the right to strike and the establishment is STILL petrified.’

    But Paul Mason, formerly of BBC Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and now a would-be Labour MP under Starmer, attacked the film as presenting:

    ‘a full-blown conspiracy theory about Corbyn’s opponents, conflating Zionists, Jews and Israel as part of a force that “orchestrated” his overthrow.’

    Mason gave a specific example:

    ‘Seventeen minutes in, after presenting evidence of an “orchestrated campaign” against Corbyn, the narrator, Alexei Sayle asks: “But if it was an orchestrated campaign, who was in the orchestra?” There follows a silent montage showing the Jewish Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour Friends of Israel, and the Israel Advocacy Movement.

    ‘As a professional film-maker I recognise this wordless presentation of a controversial idea not as an accident but as a technique: using captions and pictures to state what, if spoken aloud, could be accused of anti-Semitism.’

    Mason’s description is a gross distortion. This section of the film does indeed address the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the UK, with the montage indicating key players. But prior to this section, The Big Lie already emphasises the crucial point that it was the establishment as a whole that worked tirelessly to bring Corbyn down, even to the extent of an unnamed acting British army general threatening that the army would ‘mutiny’ and that ‘people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul’ to get rid of Corbyn (Sunday Times, 20 September 2015).

    Sayle, as narrator, stated unequivocally that: ‘For the establishment, the sudden rise of Corbyn was terrifying.’

    He continued: ‘Corbyn was anti-capitalist, anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons. A socialist, even.’

    Mike Cowley, a Labour Party member, said:

    ‘I guess that’s what gave the establishment such a fright, to a degree, because they saw the numbers he was mobilising. And, as we began to see, it’s not actually Corbyn they’re afraid of. It’s us – he’s only one man. It’s us, they’re afraid of.’

    Sayle then pointed out that:

    ‘From the start, Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest threat was from his own Labour MPs.’

    After the 1917 election, the campaign against Corbyn ‘went into overdrive’:

    ‘The Tory press threw its all at Jeremy Corbyn. They tried smear after smear [front-page press montage]. But in the end, only one stuck [alleged antisemitism].’

    In other words, the film overwhelmingly makes clear that the pro-Israel lobby was only one player in a much larger orchestra that was fundamentally establishment, not Jewish, in nature. Mason chose to ignore this in his review. And yet, he had himself accepted the wider conspiracy in 2020:

    ‘A senior group of Labour staffers actively conspired for the party to lose the 2017 election… this is a Watergate moment, not just for Labour but for British politics’

    On Twitter, leftist singer Billy Bragg joined the attack on the film:

    ‘The problem with the film is that it implies there is a Jewish conspiracy behind Corbyn’s defeat. The fact that the film’s supporters have been blaming the Israeli lobby for the ban rather than the content of the film kinda underlines their lack of understanding of that problem’

    As evidence, Bragg then cited Mason’s misleading quote (presumably, and ill-advisedly, because Bragg had not himself seen the film) as an attempted ‘Gotcha!’

    Jackie Walker, a Jewish activist who is interviewed in The Big Lie, made an additional, relevant point when she responded to Bragg:

    ‘Labour Friends of Israel are overwhelmingly not Jewish, the Board of deputies do not hide their commitment to Israel, and the IAM [Israel Advocacy Movement] are exactly what they say on the tin – they ADVOCATE for Israel’

    The Big Lie is, of course, right to address the important part played by the pro-Israel lobby. It includes clips from the Al Jazeera film, The Lobby, which exposed Israel’s determined attempts to interfere in Britain’s politics. In particular, Israeli embassy official Shai Masot was caught on film boasting that he could help ‘bring down’ pro-Palestinian MPs. A clip of Peter Oborne, former political editor of the Telegraph, from the same Al Jazeera film, is also shown in which he says:

    ‘It [the actions of the Israel lobby] is outrageous interference in British politics. It shouldn’t be permitted.’

    On Twitter, Ben Sellers observed that:

    ‘I have worked in Parliament & been an anti-racist activist all my adult life. I’m not naive about these things. I watched the film very carefully for anything that could be deemed antisemitic. The idea that it implies a “Jewish conspiracy” defeated Corbyn is a distortion.’

    He continued:

    ‘What it does is explain that organisations (with their own centrist & right-wing politics) inside & outside the party, worked to create a crisis for Corbyn’s leadership & in order to defeat the left in the party. This is well documented & evidenced (e.g in the Al Jazeera docs).’

    Sellers concluded:

    ‘It’s not a conspiracy theory – it’s an argument. And what people [like Mason and Bragg] don’t like is that argument. They don’t want to hear it. So they’ve manage[d] to silence the voice of left-wing Jews (on the basis that the Jewish community is some sort of monolith). That’s dangerous & undemocratic.’

    ‘Anti-Racists Accused of Racism by Racists’

    ‘The Big Lie’ also highlights the incessant establishment media attacks on Corbyn, particularly after the 2017 General Election which he came so close to winning. The ‘smear that stuck’ was the myth that antisemitism was supposedly rife in Labour under Corbyn. A ‘cancer’, as one despicable newspaper headline put it.

    In his distorted review of the documentary, Mason raised the spectre of legal action on the grounds that the film supposedly breaches the politically biased and much-disputed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Simply put, the film dares to criticise the apartheid state of Israel, its lobbyists and the media acolytes who campaigned to smear Corbyn and his supporters, including long-time grassroots Labour activists.

    As journalist Jonathan Cook observed in 2021, a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups was able to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been wrongly described as the ‘gold standard’ definition of antisemitism. The definition has now become ‘a cudgel’ with which to beat critics of Israel and to suppress the rights of Palestinians.

    Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor at Oxford University, observed in the foreword of a 2021 report on how the definition of antisemitism has been misrepresented:

    ‘[A] definition intended to protect Jews against antisemitism was twisted to protect the State of Israel against valid criticisms that have nothing to do with anti-Jewish racism.’

    In September 2018, Alexei Sayle had told a packed fringe meeting at the Labour party conference that:

    ‘There can be no greater injustice than anti-racists being accused of racism by racists.’

    That is a precise and succinct summary of what has been happening in recent years.

    Having watched the complete documentary, Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie, it is clear that it is thoroughly researched, relies on credible and articulate interviewees, and its arguments are expertly marshalled and presented. The notion that it is in any way ‘antisemitic’ is just a sign of how far down the road of totalitarian censorship we have travelled in this country.

    Glastonbury Capitulates

    Rather than spring to the film’s defence, Michael Walker of Novara Media criticised the film’s title:

    ‘Normally I’m v against clamping down on any open discussion about what happened in and to labour between 2015 and 2019. But calling your film “the big lie” is, at best, really really dumb.’

    Why? Because Hitler had used the same phrase, ‘the big lie’. But, as several people pointed out in response to Walker’s ‘really really dumb’ comment, so have many others. In fact, ‘the big lie’ comes from one of the Jewish contributors to the film, Moshé Machover, in describing the smears against Corbyn. Moreover, Walker admitted he had not even seen the film.

    This continued the shameful record of Novara – remember, supposedly an ‘alternative’ to the corporate media – in failing to critically appraise the weaponising of antisemitism; indeed, accepting the myth that antisemitism was endemic under Corbyn-led Labour.

    Once they had caved in to pro-Israel pressure to cancel the film, the Glastonbury festival organisers then issued a statement in which they said:

    ‘Although we believe that the Pilton Palais [cinema] booked this film in good faith, in the hope of provoking political debate, it’s become clear that it is not appropriate for us to screen it at the festival.

    ‘Glastonbury is about unity and not division, and we stand against all forms of discrimination.’

    What a contrast from 2017 when Corbyn had addressed a massive, appreciative crowd at Glastonbury, proclaiming a message of ‘unity, and not division’ and ‘standing against all forms of discrimination’.

    The BDBJ crowed that the film had now been cancelled:

    ‘We are pleased that in the wake of a letter we sent earlier today, @glastonbury have announced the cancellation of the screening of this film. Hateful conspiracy theories should have no place in our society.’

    Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, a founding member of Jewish Voice for Labour who was expelled from Starmer’s Labour Party for being the ‘wrong type of Jew’, said on Twitter:

    ‘Unbelievable that @glastonbury has bowed to demands from fans of Starmer’s @uklabour, banning a film exposing demonisation of @jeremycorbyn. The censors say the film conflates Zionists, Jews & Israel. No, actually, that’s what they do. See it & judge for yourself.’

    US journalist Glenn Greenwald noted:

    ‘The @glastonbury Film Festival capitulated to pressure and cancelled the Corbyn documentary.

    ‘This illustrates the great crisis in the democratic world: an intense fixation on suppressing and silencing, rather than engaging, dissenting views.

    ‘Every solution now is censorship.’

    It is indeed the ‘solution’ seen by established power, and it is utterly wrong.

    There was minimal reporting by the British state-corporate media and, crucially, no uproar about censorship and yet another step being taken towards suppression of free speech. There was a handful of short news reports, including in the Independent, the Evening Standard, the Guardian (passed over in just three lines), the Times, Daily Mail and Telegraph.

    These mainly led with the charges of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘conspiracy theory’. The Evening Standard also carried a smear piece, ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn: Glasto myth and a poisonous conspiracy theory’, by Tanya Gold.

    The single significant piece refuting the specious, cynical charges was an article in the Independent reporting the reaction of Norman Thomas, the film’s producer. He said that the film’s cancellation had been caused by ‘vicious outside pressure’. He added:

    ‘An outside pressure group [BDBJ] has declared war on our film. They wrote to the festival’s sponsors… and whipped up huge storm of complaints about the film claiming, without any foundation whatsoever, that the film is antisemitic.’

    He continued:

    ‘The claim that the film is antisemitic is a total smear.

    ‘The festival organisers even had a lawyer examine the film who pronounced it totally devoid of antisemitism. [Our emphasis]’

    As we have also seen with the cruel persecution of Julian Assange and the treatment of Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, the establishment is becoming ever fiercer in its attacks on those who challenge power.

    It is ironic indeed that Glenn Greenwald, a US journalist, is far more vocal in defending UK freedom of speech than British journalists. A great silence has fallen over the media in this country.

  • AI will turbocharge disinformation while lax regulation is the norm

    United Nations chief António Guterres recently called out mis- and disinformation as a “grave global harm”, while launching a key report on the issue. The report is part of a series of UN policy priorities and calls out mis- and disinformation as dangerous and deadly, with hate speech on digital platforms being linked to violence…

    The post AI will turbocharge disinformation while lax regulation is the norm appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • RNZ investigating series of ‘Kremlin-friendly’ story edits in audit

    RNZ MEDIAWATCH: By Hayden Donnell, RNZ Mediawatch producer

    RNZ is investigating how online stories about the war in Ukraine, supplied by an international news agency, were edited to align with the Russian view of events.

    A staff member has been stood down while other stories are audited. It has also prompted an external review of RNZ’s online news publishing.

    The alarm was raised after a story was published by RNZ on Friday about the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which contained significant amendments to the original copy by the international wire service Reuters.

    The alarm was raised after a story was published by RNZ on Friday about the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict which contained significant amendments to the original copy by the international wire service Reuters.

    The original story by its Moscow bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge said:

    “The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces fighting Ukraine’s armed forces.”

    But when republished on RNZ.co.nz, that passage adopted a more “Kremlin-friendly” framing.

    “The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014 after a pro-Russian elected government was toppled during Ukraine’s violent Maidan colour revolution. Russia annexed Crimea after a referendum, as the new pro-Western government suppressed ethnic Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine, sending in its armed forces to the Donbas.”

    RNZ's edits to a story about an escalation in the war in Ukraine.
    RNZ’s edits to a 9 June 2023 story about an escalation in the war in Ukraine. Image: BusinessDesk/RNZ

    ‘False account of events’
    RNZ’s 4pm news bulletin on Friday said the version published by RNZ “included a false account of events” and RNZ was investigating how the story was “changed to reflect a pro-Russian view”.

    RNZ corrected the story online, adding a footnote which said it was “taking the issue extremely seriously.”

    The "war talk" Reuters article on 9 June 2023 bylined Guy Faulconbridge that sparked the inquiry
    The “war talk” Reuters article on 9 June 2023 bylined Guy Faulconbridge that helped spark the RNZ inquiry. Image: RNZ screenshot APR

    Late on Friday, RNZ said an investigation was under way into “the alleged conduct of one employee” who had been “placed on leave while we look into these matters”.

    “We are auditing other articles to check whether there are further problems,” the statement said.

    RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson said the inappropriate editing of the stories to reflect a pro-Moscow perspective was deeply concerning and would be addressed accordingly.

    Other stories in the spotlight
    Another RNZ.co.nz story on the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam described the 2014 Maidan Revolution as a “coup” — pro-Russian language which did not appear in the original Reuters text.

    These stories repeat false claims that Russia’s annexation of Crimea happened after a referendum on the move. The invasion was underway before the vote was held.

    “Colour revolution” is sometimes used to describe protest movements backed by foreign powers with the intention of regime change.

    Describing the 2014 revolution in those terms or as a “coup” aligns with the official Russian perspectives, but contradicts the Ukrainian view.

    The assertion that ethnic Russian citizens were suppressed by the Ukrainian government has also been used by Russia to justify the invasion of Ukraine, but there is scant evidence for his claim. The BBC’s Kyiv correspondent called it “demonstrably false” in 2014.

    One of the RNZ disclaimer editorial notes on audited reports
    One of the RNZ disclaimer editorial notes on audited reports . . . this one was on the report originally published on 26 May 2022 and republished today with “balanced” quotes. Image: RNZ screenshot APR

    An RNZ News footnote now says the story was “edited inappropriately and has been corrected” and “we are investigating.”

    Other Reuters stories on rnz.co.nz with similar editorial alterations came to light on Friday. RNZ added footnotes explaining they had been “edited inappropriately and had been corrected.”

    One about the first large-scale air strikes in nearly two months had said “Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine claiming that a US-backed coup in 2014 with the help of neo-Nazis had created a threat to its borders — and had ignited a civil war that saw Russian-speaking minorities persecuted.”

    That example was from late-April — and it is surprising no-one noticed the inflammatory additions to it until Friday’s revelations prompted a look-back.

    RNZ confirmed late on Friday night “the alleged conduct of one employee” was under investigation. Mediawatch understands this is a member of RNZ’s digital team.

    The statement said the staffer had been “placed on leave while we look into these matters – and audit other articles to check for further problems”.

    In a further statement in Saturday evening, RNZ said 15 inappropriately edited stories had been identified and corrected so far.

    Chief executive Paul Thompson said an external review of RNZ’s online news publishing processes would now be carried out by experts “to ensure these are robust”. The results of the review would be made public, he said.

    Outside sources
    Reuters is aware of the issue but has not responded to a request for comment.

    An online user in the US who noted “Russian propaganda . . . on the Reuters wire today under the byline of its Moscow bureau chief” said a Reuters representative told them language appearing on RNZ’s site “was not written by Reuters or Guy Faulconbridge.”

    Reuters’ website terms and conditions warns: “You may not remove, alter, forward, scrape, frame, in-line link, copy, sell, distribute, retransmit, create derivative works . . . without our prior written consent.”

    Mediawatch also asked RNZ if it was permitted to alter copy supplied by Reuters.

    “There will be no comment until that investigation is completed and any appropriate action taken,” RNZ replied.

    International news agencies such as Reuters supply news on a commercial basis to clients.

    The terms of agreements with media organisations vary, but commonly allow media customers to edit text for length and to permit the addition of relevant details specific to the territory in question.

    Significant changes not permitted
    Passages of text can usually be included in or added to stories published by client media companies, but significant editorial changes are generally not permitted where the published story is attributed to the agency.

    RNZ’s editorial policy contains a section on material from “external sources” but doesn’t specify news agency suppliers.

    “Staff may not ‘lift’ material from other news organisations with which we have no supply contract without independently authenticating the information before use,” it says.

    “We should be aware of the dangers involved, particularly if the material is controversial.”

    RNZ’s editorial policies also say audiences “should not be able to detect a presenter or journalist’s personal views”

    “Staff will have opinions of their own, but they must not yield to bias or prejudice. To be professional is not to be without opinions, but to be aware of those opinions and make allowances for them, so that reporting is judicious and fair.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why Has WSJ Become a “Professional Rumormonger” against China?

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    On June 8, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an “exclusive report” citing anonymous US officials, stating that China agreed to pay cash-strapped Cuba several billion dollars to allow it to build an eavesdropping station. To understand what this news means to Washington, which has become so sensitive about China-related issues, we can refer to the “Chinese made cranes,” “corn factories,” and “balloon incident” that the US hyped up earlier this year. The nature of these events is somewhat similar, though the severity cannot be compared with the “Cuban eavesdropping station,” but they have all caused a stir in the US.

    Cuba is only about 160 kilometers from Florida. If China really builds surveillance facilities there, will Washington’s politicians still be able to sleep? The WSJ called it “a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the US,” which immediately reminded people of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War – the Cuban missile crisis. Other US media outlets quickly followed suit, and the members of Congress who have made being anti-China their political careers also took action. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a joint statement solemnly stating that building a spy base will pose a “serious threat to our national security and sovereignty.” As a result, the tension suddenly increased, and these people obviously wanted to escalate the situation.

    John Kirby, spokesperson for the US National Security Council, said before the WSJ article was published that he couldn’t comment on the details of the report, but stated that the US was monitoring the situation and taking steps. After the article was published, Kirby clearly stated that “this report is not accurate,” so there were obvious contradictions. The Pentagon also said that the media reports are “not accurate.” To be honest, the denials by the White House and the Pentagon were somewhat surprising. It may be that the quality of the WSJ’s information is so poor that officials cannot publicly endorse it. Cuba stated that the article was “totally mendacious and unfounded information,” and China pointed out that “spreading rumors and slander” is a common tactic of “hacker empire” the US.

    The WSJ is a habitual and repeat offender when it comes to spreading rumors about China. Not long ago, it created a major international rumor by saying that China proposed recognizing the “occupied territories of Ukraine as part of Russia.” Because it was so absurd, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba immediately refuted the claim and clarified it. There are many such examples. However, not only does the WSJ not take responsibility or pay the price for these false accusations, it instead thrives in stirring American public opinion and goes further down the road of spreading rumors. It is hard to believe that there was no US official tolerance, encouragement, or feeding of these rumors. People suspect that this is a case of one person playing the good guy and the other playing the bad guy. In fact, rumors have become a handy tool and weapon for the US to contain and suppress China, and they are very cheap.

    These rumors and hype often appeared at a moment when a turning point in China-US relations seems imminent. Just as the US media revealed that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken might visit China in the next week or two, the WSJ’s rumors came out, as was the case with the “balloon incident” in February. This once again made people realize that there is a force, a black hand, secretly causing damage to bilateral relations and pushing the two countries toward confrontation. When the US government uses rumors, rumors in turn also manipulate and influence the US government. The reason why the White House and the Pentagon refuted the story this time may be because they are afraid that if the rumors are allowed to ferment, they will lose control and become passive. However, the US government’s ability to control this dark political force is becoming weaker and weaker.

    From this incident, it can also be seen how difficult it is to bring the US back to a normal and rational state of understanding toward China. In fact, the US has been carrying out activities such as global surveillance, building military bases near China’s territory, and conducting close reconnaissance along China’s coast in recent years. After the false news that “China is building an eavesdropping station in Cuba” came out, some American scholars even said that China is prepared to do the same in America. This is very ironic. If those lawmakers who get nervous and lose sleep at any sign of “China wanting to cause trouble near the US” can show a little empathy and think about how the US’ actions would make Chinese people feel, China-US relations would not have reached the current difficult situation.

    The US has repeatedly expressed its hope of avoiding conflict and confrontation with China, but if something goes wrong internally every time there is a sign of an easing in bilateral relations, then this has become a major uncertainty that China-US relations face, and it is also a huge risk that the US cannot avoid. The WSJ has become a professional rumormonger against China, which is not only a media outlet degrading itself, but also a footnote to the pathological environment in Washington.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Empire Fabricates Atrocities

    Another atrocity. Yesterday, the dam holding back the waters for the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station was destroyed releasing a massive flood surge, imperilling people and places below the dam on the Dnieper River. Both sides blamed each other. From the Russian standpoint, it makes no sense to blow up the dam. According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, it was a desperate attempt to improve the defensive positions of Ukrainian forces. It is the latest atrocity in this war. On 26 September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up. Ukraine and western monopoly media blamed Russia. Again, it makes no sense that Russia would blow up pipelines to deliver its gas. Reputable journalist Seymour Hersch made clear his case that the United States, aided by Norway, sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines. Russia is no longer blamed.

    Atrocities and the disinformation surrounding them is the subject of an important book by AB Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order (Clarity Press, 2023). It is an important book because it delivers an incisive account on how hegemony is systematically conducted by the US Empire. It cuts through the disinformation used to foment wars by the US, backed by its allies. What the US is engaged in is aggression, what the Nuremberg Tribunal deemed “the supreme international crime”; therefore, it undermines the US Constitution. It also creates a pretext for the US to attempt an overthrow of governments it doesn’t like, killing and displacing people, destroying infrastructure and economies, and leaving devastated lands to rebuild (often with treasuries and resources looted by the US).

    The table of contents is a lead-in to how Atrocity Fabrication reveals the systematic nature of hegemony: Cuba and Viet Nam, the US war in Korea, the disinformation about a massacre in Tiananmen Square, the first US war in the Gulf (i.e., war on Iraq), the US war on Yugoslavia, the second US war on Iraq, creating conflict with North Korea, the NATO-Libyan war, the western-backed insurgency in Syria, and the demonization of the rising economy of China.

    In each of these ten chapters, Abrams adumbrates some historical background, and a pattern of what is inimical to Empire is spelled out: anti-communism, control of resources wherever they may be, and instilling and maintaining obedience to Empire.

    Abrams makes clear what the rules-based order is: rules decided by the US for other countries; however, the US is above the law. The order is enforced by the US as it sees fit.

    It was clear that Yugoslavia’s military had not been defeated, but attacks on civilian targets and its economy had terrorised it into submission. (p 241)

    Yet, the US usually does not openly flout the laws. It will create pretexts, surround itself with supportive international actors, and call upon its stenographic media. This is one stage of atrocity fabrication. For instance, Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq and the purported genocide in Xinjiang. Abrams brings this sleazy tactic to the fore.

    Western reports were notably frequently sympathetic towards the perpetrators of terror attacks in China, with commentaries published that would be unimaginable if Western or Western-aligned countries had been similarly targeted. (p 455)

    Perhaps the worst of all fabrications is the false flag. This is when a massacre is perpetrated and the perpetrator lays the blame laid elsewhere, thereby creating a false casus belli. Such an atrocity fabrication may willfully sacrifice innocent people to attain a foreign policy objective. One example of this was the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government. The West seized upon this to vilify Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. Or the warmaker will use the fabrication to justify one’s own hand in mass killing by blaming the other side. This Madeleine Albright did when she infamously said the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth achieving US policy objectives.

    Demonizing the leader of a country that the US identifies as an enemy state (i.e., a state that is not sufficiently obedient) is another important weapon in the arsenal of Empire. Thus Assad, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Miloševic, the Kims in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Muammar Gaddafi are all caricatured along the lines of the WWII boogeyman, Adolf Hitler. Today, the US excoriates Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Nicolás Maduro, and anyone else who does not bend to Empire.

    U.S. print media notably likened Hussein to Hitler 1,035 separate times. (p 163)

    The French humanitarian NGO Medecins du Monde even spent $ 2 million on a publicity campaign promoting juxtaposed pictures of Hitler and President Milosevic, … (p 215)

    In attaining its objectives, the US will stoop to whatever means it deems necessary. Atrocity Fabrication is replete with the most sordid acts of criminality: massacres, rapes and violent sexual indecencies, torture, burying people alive, brutalizing prisoners-of-war, using cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium. The book must be read to grasp the inhumanity and perversion of warmakers.

    Whatever and whoever, thus, the US will ally with Islamic terrorist groups such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), al Qaeda, and Islamic State (IS) — and even retract the designations of groups formerly held to be terrorist, such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) and Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). In other words, the terrorist enemy of a US enemy is no longer a terrorist. Too often, it is those actors wielding the term terrorist that may be the biggest terrorist. As the noted linguist Noam Chomsky stated in the film Power and Terror (2002): “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”

    The US-aligned world has regularly resorted to propping up defectors and encouraging false narratives. Along with this is the often insidious role played by NGOs to bring down governments.

    *****
    People need to inform themselves, Atrocity Fabrication arms the reader with information to ponder and to think past mind-numbing patriotism.

    This is the third book that I have read by AB Abrams, so I am aware of the depth of research, the substantiated factuality, the logic, and the implicit morality that led to these books being written. Books by Abrams are critical reading.

    It is clear that there is a rogue entity beholden to its oligarchic class and that this lawless class seeks full spectrum domination through whatever means. That Empire and hegemony persist in the 23rd century is condemnatory; enlightened and morally centered people must relegate such criminality to an atavistic past.

    Don’t be deceived by the warmaking demagogues. Refuse to be an accomplice to killing. Life is meant for all humans to live together in peace.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Twitter withholding Australian disinformation data

    Twitter was the only tech giant covered by Australia’s voluntary disinformation and misinformation code not to publish data on the volume of local content removed from its social media platform last year. The 2023 release of annual transparency reports was published last week by industry body, the Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI). The reports are…

    The post Twitter withholding Australian disinformation data appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • D-Day = Disinformation Day

    June 6, 2023 marks 79 years since the fabled Allied invasion known as “D-Day.”

    Lost amid the annual self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that by the time of the D-Day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

    Author Alexander Cockburn explained that WWII had already been won “by the Russians at Stalingrad and then, a year before D-Day, at the Kursk Salient, where 100 German divisions were mangled. Compared with those epic struggles, D-Day was a skirmish. Hitler’s generals knew the war was lost, and the task was to keep the meeting point between the invading Russians and Western armies as far east as possible.”

    Even the National World War II Museum admits:

    Let’s be blunt: the German army lost World War II on the Eastern Front. For most of the war, 75-80 percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East, a preponderance dictated by the sheer size of the front, and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II.

    Of course, this doesn’t fit the “good war” myth, so it’s down the memory hole.

    The next time someone you know speaks of WWII in hallowed tones, remind them that:

    • The U.S. fought that war against racism with a segregated army.
    • It fought that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of surrendering soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of civilians, wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific boiling flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts.
    • FDR, the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process…thus, in the name of taking on the architects of German prison camps became the architect of American prison camps.
    • Before, during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded with the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany “the miracle of the 20th century”).
    • While the U.S. regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death in Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after the war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the CIA and NASA while advancing America’s nuclear program.

    The enduring Good War fable goes well beyond Memorial Day barbecues and flickering black-and-white movies on late-night TV. WWII is America’s most popular war. According to accepted history, it was an inevitable war forced upon peaceful people thanks to a surprise attack by a sneaky enemy.

    This war, then and now, has been carefully and consciously sold to us as a life-and-death battle against pure evil. For most Americans, WWII was nothing less than good and bad going toe-to-toe in khaki fatigues.

    Reality: American lives weren’t sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor or to end the Nazi Holocaust. WWII was about territory, power, control, money, and imperialism.

    What we’re taught about the years leading up to the Good War involves the alleged appeasement of the Third Reich. If only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the fascists could have been stopped. Having made that mistake once, the mantra goes, we can’t make it again.

    Comparing modern-day tyrants like Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler activates the following historical façade:

    After whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the US and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being severely questioned — especially when every enemy is likened to der Fuehrer.

    But it wasn’t appeasement that took place prior to WWII. It was, at best, indifference; at worst it was collaboration… based on economic greed and more than a little shared ideology.

    U.S. investment in Germany accelerated by more than 48 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Europe. For many US companies, operations in Germany continued during the war (even if it meant the use of concentration-camp slave labor) with overt US government support.

    For example, American pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by US firms. As a result, German civilians began using the Ford plant in Cologne as an air raid shelter.

    The pursuit of profit long ago transcended national borders and loyalty. Doing business with Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy proved no more unsavory to the captains of industry than, say, running sweatshops in China does today. What’s a little repression when there’s money to be made?

    Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, “It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we want rather to work on people until they are addicted to us.”

    Little has changed in the way criminality is aggressively packaged and sold to a wary public today… except for the technology by which the lies are disseminated.

    Thus, it is our moral obligation to see through our own propaganda and kick the addictive habit of lazy thinking. We must address the many uncomfortable truths — not just about WWII but about virtually everything.

    The lies and deception did not begin in March 2020, folks. Ending this evil cycle begins with each of us deciding we will refrain from knee-jerk, emotional reactions and never again buy what the parasites are selling.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Anticipating Monopoly Media Disinformation Deluge about a Tiananmen Square Massacre

    The other day, I counted 20 copies of a book called Forbidden City (1990) in a library. I picked it up and looked at the cover, and I realized it was about the so-called Tiananmen Square massacre. It was written as an on-the-spot account by a CBC news team during that time. By reading the minutiae, it is revealed to be a fictionalized account, as almost all western monopoly media reports of a Tiananmen Square massacre are — fiction.

    As I write this, June 4 is nigh upon us, and that means it is time for the western-aligned media to crank out their discredited myth of a massacre having taken place in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The photos of the Tank Man allegedly blocking tanks from entering Tiananmen Square will form a major part of the disinformation. The fact is that the tanks were leaving the city, and it was the day after the mythologized massacre. The tanks did all they could to avoid colliding with the citizen who placed himself in front of the tanks. (Read Jeff Brown’s  setting the record straight regarding the western monopoly media account of the Tank Man.)

    Alas, the monopoly media disinformation storm is already upon us.

    Human Rights Watch, funded by the anti-communist Georg Soros, published an article about a “bloody crackdown” that demands: “The Chinese government should acknowledge responsibility for the mass killing of pro-democracy demonstrators and provide redress for victims and family members.”

    The United States government-funded Radio Free Asia historizes, “Troops aligned with hardliners shot their way to Tiananmen Square to commit one of the worst massacres in modern Chinese history.” RFA was originally operated by the CIA to broadcast anti-Communist propaganda.

    The CBC quotes “Tiananmen Square survivor” Yang Jianli, now a resident in Washington, DC, who “was at Tiananmen Square in 1989” and spoke of how a “nationwide pro-democracy movement in 1989 ended in the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square massacre.”

    Yahoo!News headlines with “Tiananmen Square Fast Facts,” such as:

    In 1989, after several weeks of demonstrations, Chinese troops entered Tiananmen Square on June 4 and fired on civilians.

    Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands.

    One wonders which is the fact: several hundred or thousands? Assertions are a staple in western monopoly media, evidence is scant, but the evidence-free assertions persist year-after-year.

    There are complaints of Chinese censorship. This raises the question of whether censorship can be justified and if so under what circumstances. Arguably, there is something more insidious than censorship, and that is disinformation. Professor Anthony Hall articulated the insidiousness of disinformation at the Halifax Symposium on Media and Disinformation in 2004 where it was held to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace:

    Disinformation originates in the deliberate and systemic effort to break down social cohesion and to deprive humanity of perceptive consciousness of our conditions. Disinformation seeks to isolate and divide human beings; to alienate us from our ability to use our senses, our intellect, and our communicative powers in order to identify truth and act on this knowledge. Disinformation is deeply implicated in the history of imperialism, Eurocentric racism, American Manifest Destiny, Nazi propaganda, the psychological warfare of the Cold War, and capitalist globalization. Disinformation seeks to erode and destroy the basis of individual and collective memory, the basis of those inheritances from history which give humanity our richness of diverse languages, cultures, nationalities, peoplehoods, and means of self-determination. The reach and intensity of disinformation tends to increase with the concentration of ownership and control of the media of mass communications.

    In other words, people must not have a right to freely speak lies that reach the level of crimes against humanity or peace. The disinformation campaign about a Tiananmen Square massacre demonizes China and constitutes a crime against the humanity of the Chinese people. If people wish to allege a massacre by state forces against its citizens, then present the incontrovertible evidence. Where are the photos of soldiers killing citizens? There are plenty of photos of murdered soldiers mutilated by nasty elements outside Tiananmen Square.

    So why does the disinformation persist? Because it works when people unquestioningly accept what their unscrupulous government and media tell them: China is Communist. China is bad.

    Is such rhetoric compelling?

    American expat Godfree Roberts, author of Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom answered a Quora question: “There are people that claim nothing bad happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 What happened to the pro democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square when the tanks and troops with the PLA showed up to suddenly put and end to the protests?” Roberts replied:

    The tanks and troops with the PLA did not show up to suddenly put and end to the protests. Nor did they harm anyone in Tiananmen Square.

    They waited at the railway station for three weeks but began moving into town when rioters–like those we see in Hong Kong today–began killing people in Chang’An Avenue. Even then, the first battalions were unarmed… [emphasis in original]

    Roberts wrote another excellent Quora piece preserved at the Greanville Post.

    Regarding the wider myth created of a massacre at Tiananmen Square, the go-to evidence-based account is the book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence by Wei Ling Chua.

    Kim Petersen: In 2014, I reviewed your important book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence that threw a glaring light on what the monopoly media were saying about a massacre in Tiananmen Square versus the subsequent recantations by western-aligned journalists and the narratives of protestors and witnesses than were contrary to the western media disinformation. In other words, there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Nonetheless, people living in the western-aligned world can expect, for the most part, to be inundated with monopoly media rehashing their disinformation about what happened on 4 June 1989, omitting the nefarious roles played by the CIA and NED.

    Recently, AB Abrams included a 29-page chapter, “Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square,” in his excellent book Atrocity Fabrications and Its Consequences (2023). It basically lays out what you did in your book (without citing it), but it does present more of a historical basis for the interference of US militarism in 20th century China because of American anti-communist prejudice. Thus, the US supported the Guomindang (KMT) led by the brutal Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek). Abrams reads quite critical of paramount leader Deng Xiaopeng, quoting one student who complained of the increasing corruption under Deng that was not tolerated under chairman Mao Zedong. (p 125) Basically, however, Abrams buttresses what you had already written, pointing a stern finger at Operation Yellowbird’s NED, CIA, and Hong Kong criminal triads who inserted (and extracted) unruly (even bloodthirsty, notably Chai Ling) elements into Tiananmen Square who happened to find themselves well armed and supplied with Molotov cocktails, and who were not hesitant about using lethal force against remarkably restrained PLA soldiers.

    Despite the several recantations by western journalists in Beijing who had reported a massacre and despite the narratives that seriously impugn the monopoly media narratives, why does the myth of a massacre in Tiananmen Square persist? How is it that this fabricated atrocity gets dredged up annually, and why do so many people buy into the disinformation proffered by a source serially revealed to be manufacturing demonstrably false narratives? How can this disinformation be exterminated?

    Finally, massacres should not be forgotten, but if the narratives of massacres are meant to be revisited annually, then shouldn’t the massacres carried out — especially by one’s own side — also be memorialized, as an act of penance and atonement? In the US case, there would be yearly memorials to the massacres of several Indigenous peoples by the White natives of Europe. There are several massacres requiring atonement for the rampant criminality of the White Man. Wounded Knee, the Bear Creek massacre, the Sand Creek massacre, and the Trail of Tears spring readily to mind. There is the Kwangju massacre in South Korea, My Lai in Viet Nam, Fallujah in Iraq (and this is just skimming the surface). What does it say that the US-aligned media unquestioningly reports on fabricated atrocities elsewhere while being insouciant to the crimes of American troops against Others?

    Wei Ling Chua: Since publishing the book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence (The Art of Media Disinformation is Hurting the World and Humanity vol. 2) in 2014, I began to use Google alerts to receive daily emails on any news or articles posted on the net with the term “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, and it is depressing to say that the Western media disregards their own journalists’ confessions and have continued to unrelentingly use the term frequently over the past 34 years.

    The following description introduces the book.

    Readers will notice from the table of contents that this book comes in 4 parts:

    1) Screenshot evidence of journalists who confessed that they saw no one die that day (June 4th, 1989) at Tiananmen Square, CIA declassified documents, WikiLeaks, and Human Rights Watch decided not to publish their own eye-witnesses accounts that report that support the Chinese side of the stories… ;

    2) Explanation, with examples, of how the Western media used the power of words to overpower the silent evidence (their own photos and video images) that actually shows highly restrained, people-loving PLA soldiers and the CCP government handling of the 7 weeks of protests.

    3) Explanation of the 3 stage bottle-necks effect of the market economy and how Western nations respond to each stage of such economic hardship created by an uncontrolled market economy. The purpose of such analysis is to remind developing nations’ citizens not to destroy their own countries by allowing Western-funded NGOs to carry out covert operations in their countries to create chaos at times of economic hardship;

    4) Comparing how the CCP handled the 1989 protesters with the US government handling of the 2011 anti-Wall Street protesters [Occupy Wall Street], the book draws a 6-point conclusion to explain why the Wall Street protesters should admire the Tiananmen protesters, and why the PLA deserves a Nobel Peace prize:

    • Freedom of protesters
    • The rule of law
    • The barricade strategy
    • Brutality of authorities
    • Media freedom
    • Government response

    I encourage readers to read the book review by you: Massacre? What Massacre?

    The US and other Western governments are notorious in promoting hatred, fake news, and misleading information about China. As a result, whenever foreigners went to China for the first time, they seemed to be shocked by how advanced, how wealthy, how safe, how green, how friendly, and how beautiful China is. A lot of YouTubers from all over the world voluntarily and passionately produce videos to share their daily impression of China or to defend China against any smear campaigns by the Western media. Below is just a quick pick of a dozen YouTubers:

    As for getting at the truth, the best way to understand a country is to travel there and see it with our own eyes:

    At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a group of American athletes arrived at the Beijing International Airport with masks and later were shocked that the air quality was good and that they were the only ones wearing masks in Beijing. They were also shocked by how beautiful and modern Beijing is compared to American cities. In an embarrassment to America, these young Americans were spot on and held a press conference to publicly apologize to the Chinese people for their mask-wearing insult to China.

    The same thing happened to many Taiwanese, many were so ignorant about China that they thought that the Chinese people were very poor. In 2011, a Taiwanese professor Gao Zhibin told his audience in a TV show that the mainland Chinese are so poor that they cannot even afford to eat a tea leaf egg. That video became a laughing stock and quickly circulated being viewed by hundreds of millions of Chinese people, and even made its way to the Chinese mainstream media across the country as a sort of entertainment. Now, the Taiwanese Professor has a nickname in China: “tea leaf egg professor“.

    Hong Kong also has the same problem. So, after putting down the US-backed violent protests a few years ago, one of the education programs is to take the students for a free trip to the mainland to see by themselves how prosperous, green, clean, modern, friendly, and advanced their mother country is.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ben Roberts-Smith: The Breaking of a Plaster Saint

    It was an ugly case lasting five years with a host of ugly revelations. But what could be surprising about the murderous antics of a special arm of the military, in this case, the Australian Special Air Service Regiment, which was repeatedly deployed on missions in an open-ended war which eventually led to defeat and withdrawal?

    Ben Roberts-Smith was meant to be a poster boy of the regiment, the muscular noble representative who served in Afghanistan, a war with sketchy justifications. Along the way, he became Australia’s most decorated soldier, raking in the Medal of Gallantry in 2006, the Victoria Cross in 2010, and a Commendation for Distinguished Services for outstanding leadership in over 50 high-risk operations in 2012. He came to be lionised in the popular press, even being named “Father of the Year” in 2013.

    A number of his colleagues, keen to take him down a peg or two, saw through the sheen. As did journalists at The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times. The deployments by the special forces to Afghanistan had not, as the narrative would have it, been paved with heroic engagements of military valour. Roberts-Smith, it seemed, was less plaster saint than ruthless executioner and bully.

    Some of the transgressions reported on by the papers were very much of the same type investigated by the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force. The findings were eventually made available in the stomach churning Brereton Report, released in 2020.

    But even prior to that, a 2016 report by sociologist Samantha Crompvoets, commissioned by the Special Operations Commander of Australia (SOCAUST), noted body count competitions and the use of the Joint Priority Effects List (JPEL) among special force personnel sent to Afghanistan. The JPEL became what effectively amounted to a “sanctioned kill list”.
    Unsurprisingly, the numbers that were put forth were cooked, often featuring the gratuitous torture and killing of unarmed villagers.

    Roberts-Smith, incensed by the reporting, commenced defamation proceedings against the three papers in question, and the journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe. The use of such a civil weapon is often odious, a measure designed to intimidate scribblers and reporters from publishing material that might enlighten. While the defamation laws have been mildly improved since the trial’s commencement, featuring a public interest defence, the publishers here could only really avail themselves of the truth defence.

    In the proceedings, three groups of articles featured, sporting a ghoulish succession of allegations. The first, published on June 8 and 9, 2018, are said to have conveyed three imputations: that Roberts-Smith “murdered an unarmed and defenceless Afghan civilian, by kicking him off a cliff and procuring the soldiers under his command to shoot him”; that he also breached moral and legal rules of military engagement thereby making him a criminal; and “disgraced his country Australia and the Australian army by his conduct as a member of the SASR in Afghanistan.”

    The second group of articles, published on June 9 and 10 that year, were alleged to convey three imputations of murder, including the pressuring of a new, inexperienced SASR recruit to execute an elderly, unarmed Afghan as part of the “blood the rookie” ritual and the killing of a man with a prosthetic leg.

    The third group of articles, published in August 2018, contain a whole medley of imputations including alleged domestic violence against a woman at Canberra’s Hotel Realm; the authorising of an unarmed Afghan’s execution by a junior member of his patrol; assaults on unarmed Afghans; bullying of one of the troops – one Trooper M – and threatening to report another soldier – trooper T – to the International Criminal Court for firing on civilians “unless he provided an account of a friendly fire incident that was consistent with the applicant’s”.

    The trial ended in July 2022, after 110 days of legal submissions and evidence. During its course, Roberts-Smith, through his lawyers, dismissed the reliability of the eyewitness accounts. They were the bitter offerings of jealousy and mania, products of fantasy and fabulism.

    On June 1, the Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko found against Roberts-Smith. The three papers, along with the journalists, had made out the defence of substantial truth of several imputations made under the Defamation Act 2005 of New South Wales. The defence of contextual truth was also successful on a number of claims.

    Most damning for Roberts-Smith was the establishment of the substantial truth of the first three imputations: the murder of a defenceless Afghan in Darwan by means of kicking him off a cliff and ordering troops to fire upon him, breaching the laws of military engagement and disgracing the country’s armed forces. The newspapers had not, however, established the Particulars of Truth on two missions – that to Syahchow (October 20, 2012) and Fasil (November 5, 2012). Contextual truth was also made out on the allegations of domestic violence and bullying claims.

    The net effect of the claims proven to be substantially and contextually true meant that the unproven statements had done little to inflict overall damage upon the soldier’s reputation. The plaster saint had cracked.

    In the assessment of Peter Bartlett, law partner at the firm MinterEllison and also one of the lawyers representing the papers, “Never has Australia seen a media defendant face such challenges from a plaintiff and his funders. This is an enormous and epic win for freedom of speech and the right for the public to know.”

    Fine words. Yet this murky case does little to edify the efforts of a unit that executed its missions with a degree of frightening zeal, let alone the commanders that deployed its members in the first place. Therein lies the uncomfortable truth to the whole matter. When trained killers perform their job well, morality beats a hasty retreat. Expectations of priestly judgment and pastoral consideration evaporate before the use of force. The ultimate saddling of responsibility must always lie higher up the chain of command, ending in the offices of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

    Even now, the journalists involved claim they can find gemstones in the gutter, better angels among depraved beasts. According to James Chessell, managing director at Nine, which owns the three newspapers, the ruling was “a vindication for the brave soldiers of the SAS who served their country with distinction, and then had the courage to speak the truth about what happened in Afghanistan.” But did it really do that?

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • State Department Asset Spreading China’s Lies On Tibet

    State Department Asset Spreading China's Lies On Tibet

    Print-Screen Of RFA Report/ Amended For Accuracy by @tibettruth

    We’ve long exposed an alarming deficiency of Radio Free Asia‘s coverage on Tibet. This flaw is not about editorial style or journalistic errors but a policy, one hard-wired into their reportage.

    Funded from the US State Department; and with longstanding concerns of a corrosive Chinese influence at work within its offices, its output on Tibet carefully and consistently uses Chinese terms to describe, what in fact, are Tibetan locations, place-names and regions.

    This stems from the decades old policy of appeasement towards China’s regime by the State Department which (having in 1972 abandoned the courageous Tibetan resistance) was keen to recognize Chinese claims that Tibet was an inalienable part of China. It maintains that troubling stance.

    In terms of politics and objective RFA is effectively an extension of the State Department, which explains why their editors are meticulously consistent in saturating reports on Tibet with descriptions that conform to and repeat official Chinese propaganda .

    It would seem they recognize no issue of journalistic integrity, are either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the immense bravery of Tibetans from inside occupied Tibet, who risk everything to get information out. However, editorial loyalty is clearly towards the tainted policy of their State Department paymasters.

    Take the example, shown in a screenshot above, published 5/30.202023. It was edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster, who paid particular attention to placing within the report the following distortions: ‘in China’s Qinghai province’, ‘Tibetans living in Rebgong county’, ‘in western China’, ‘a Tibetan-populated area of China’s Qinghai province’, and ‘Tibetan-populated regions of western China’.

    This post was originally published on Digital Activism Im Support Of Tibetan Independence.

  • Rise in NZ disinformation, conspiracy theories prompts calls for election protections

    By Russell Palmer, RNZ News digital political journalist

    Unprecedented levels of disinformation will only get worse this election in Aotearoa New Zealand, but systems set up to deal with it during the pandemic have all been shut down, Disinformation Project researcher Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa has warned.

    He says the levels of vitriol and conspiratorial discourse this past week or two are worse than anything he has seen during the past two years of the pandemic — including during the Parliament protest — but he is not aware of any public work to counteract it.

    “There is no policy, there’s no framework, there’s no real regulatory mechanism, there’s no best practice, and there’s no legal oversight,” Dr Hattotuwa told RNZ News.

    He says urgent action should be taken, and could include legislation, community-based initiatives, or a stronger focus on the recommendations of the 15 March 2019 mosque attacks inquiry.

    Highest levels of disinformation, conspiratorialism seen yet
    Dr Hattotuwa said details of the project’s analysis of violence and content from the past week — centred on the visit by British activist Posie Parker — were so confronting he could not share it.

    “I don’t want to alarm listeners, but I think that the Disinformation Project — with evidence and in a sober reflection and analysis of what we are looking at — the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share, because the BSA (Broadcasting Standards Authority) guidelines won’t allow it.

    Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa
    Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa, research fellow from The Disinformation Project . . . “I don’t want to alarm listeners, but . . . the honest assessment is not something that I can quite share.” Image: RNZ News

    “The fear is very much … particularly speaking as a Sri Lankan who has come from and studied for doctoral research offline consequences of online harm, that I’m seeing now in Aotearoa New Zealand what I studied and I thought I had left behind back in Sri Lanka.”

    The new levels of vitriol were unlike anything seen since the project’s daily study began in 2021, and included a rise in targeting of politicians specifically by far-right and neo-Nazi groups, he said.

    But — as the SIS noted in its latest report this week — the lines were becoming increasingly blurred between those more ideologically motivated groups, and the newer ones using disinformation and targeting authorities and government.

    “You know, distinction without a difference,” he said. “The Disinformation Project is not in the business of looking at the far right and neo-Nazis — that’s a specialised domain that we don’t consider ourselves to be experts in — what we do is to look at disinformation.

    “Now to find that you have neo-Nazis, the far-right, anti-semitic signatures — content, presentations and engagement — that colours that discourse is profoundly worrying because you would want to have a really clear distinction.

    No Telegram ‘guardrail’
    “There is no guardrail on Telegram against any of this, it’s one click away. And so there’s a whole range of worries and concerns we have … because we can’t easily delineate anymore between what would have earlier been very easy categorisation.”

    Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson said she had been subjected to increasing levels of abuse in recent weeks with a particular far-right flavour.

    “The online stuff is particularly worrying but no matter who it’s directed towards we’ve got to remember that can also branch out into actual violence if we don’t keep a handle on it,” she said.

    “Strong community connection in real life is what holds off the far-right extremism that we’ve seen around the world … we also want the election to be run where every politician takes responsibility for a humane election dialogue that focuses on the issues, that doesn’t drum up extra hate towards any other politician or any other candidate.”

    James Shaw & Marama Davidson
    Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson . . . Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ News

    Limited protection as election nears
    Dr Hattotuwa said it was particularly worrying considering the lack of tools in New Zealand to deal with disinformation and conspiratorialism.

    “Every institutional mechanism and framework that was established during the pandemic to deal with disinformation has now been dissolved. There is nothing that I know in the public domain of what the government is doing with regards to disinformation,” Dr Hattotuwa said.

    “The government is on the backfoot in an election year — I can understand in terms of realpolitik, but there is no investment.”

    He believed the problem would only get worse as the election neared.

    “The anger, the antagonism is driven by a distrust in government that is going to be instrumentalised to ever greater degrees in the future, around public consultative processing, referenda and electoral moments.

    “The worry and the fear is, as has been noted by the Green Party, that the election campaigning is not going to be like anything that the country has ever experienced … that there will be offline consequences because of the online instigation and incitement.

    “It’s really going to give pause to, I hope, the way that parties consider their campaign. Because the worry is — in a high trust society in New Zealand — you kind of have the expectation that you can go out and meet the constituency … I know that many others are thinking that this is now not something that you can take for granted.”

    Possible countermeasures
    Dr Hattotuwa said countermeasures could include legislation, security-sector reform, community-based action, or a stronger focus on implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (RCOI) into the terrorist attack on Christchurch mosques.

    “There are a lot of recommendations in the RCOI that, you know, are being just cosmetically dealt with. And there are a lot of things that are not even on the government’s radar. So there’s a whole spectrum of issues there that I think really call for meaningful conversations and investment where it’s needed.”

    National’s campaign chair Chris Bishop said the party did not have any specific campaign preparations under way in relation to disinformation, but would be willing to work with the government on measures to counteract it.

    “If the goverment thinks we should be taking them then we’d be happy to sit down and have a conversation about it,” he said.

    “Obviously we condemn violent rhetoric and very sadly MPs and candidates in the past few years have been subject to more of that including threats made to their physical wellbeing and we condemn that and we want to try to avoid that as much as possible.”

    Labour’s campaign chair Megan Woods did not respond to requests for comment.

    Ardern’s rhetoric not translating to policy
    Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke during her valedictory farewell speech in Parliament on Wednesday about the loss of the ability to “engage in good robust debates and land on our respective positions relatively respectfully”.

    “While there were a myriad of reasons, one was because so much of the information swirling around was false. I could physically see how entrenched it was for some people.”

    Jacinda Ardern gives her valedictory speech to a packed debating chamber at Parliament.
    Former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern gives her valedictory speech. Image: Phil Smith/RNZ News

    Ardern is set to take up an unpaid role at the Christchurch Call, which was set up after the terror attacks and has a focus on targeting online proliferation of dis- and mis-information and the spread of hateful rhetoric.

    Dr Hattotuwa said Ardern had led the world in her own rhetoric around the problem, but real action now needed to be taken.

    “Let me be very clear, PM Ardern was a global leader in articulating the harm that disinformation has on democracy — at NATO, at Harvard, and then at the UN last year. There has been no translation into policy around that which she articulated publicly, so I think that needs to occur.

    “I mean, when people say that they’re going to go and vent their frustration it might mean with a placard, it might mean with a gun.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Pro-Israel and Ukraine Groups Use Identity Politics to Attack Free Speech

    Questioning Canada’s contribution to NATO’s proxy war is “hate” that must be shut down according to some Ukrainian groups mimicking Zionist organizations by promoting an identity politics laced cancel culture.

    A Ukrainian student group sought to cancel my talk at Kings College in London, Ontario, on Thursday. In “Western Ukrainian Students’ Association Statement on The King’s University College Yves Engler Event”, they called me an “apologist to a bloodthirsty regime … who spreads disinformation and uses Russian propaganda talking points.” They also argued that I “endanger victims of colonialism everywhere” and my speaking “may also incite violence on campus.” The statement boldly concluded, “we cannot allow a proponent of hateful disinformation and Russian propaganda on our campuses in any capacity.”

    I have referred to the Russian invasion as “illegal” and “brutal” in dozens of articles and interviews. But I’ve also challenged Canada’s role in provoking and escalating the conflict. In a sign of their fanaticism, the event at Western wasn’t even about Ukraine but rather Canada’s contribution to Palestinian dispossession.

    A few days before the Western Ukrainian Students’ Association released their statement a master’s student at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs published a similar attack on a January event I did with Tamara Lorincz and Miguel Figueroa. The Chair of the Carleton University Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and Model NATO, Matthew Selinger, labelled me a “master of historical revisionism that runs in line with Russian propaganda.” The former Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) intern concluded with a call to defund Carleton’s Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) for simply having booked the room used for the Ottawa Peace Council event titled “The War in Ukraine: What is the Path to Peace?”

    In the Charlatan student paper Selinger wrote that OPIRG needed to be held “accountable for exploiting its campus status for malignant purposes. Should OPIRG refuse to condemn the speakers’ messages and halt sponsorship of future events that trot out Kremlin disinformation as a rational perspective, then defunding must be pursued. This panel should’ve never taken place on campus. Carleton’s deafening silence on the hateful and vilifying rhetoric towards Ukrainian students can be corrected, among other recommendations, by drafting an official policy on combating disinformation in non-departmental events.”

    Immediately after the event the Charlatan published “Carleton student groups address anti-Ukrainian hate on campus” about the Carleton Ukrainian Students’ Club bid to have our event canceled.

    An even more intense campaign of vilifying antiwar voices as “hate” has taken place in recent months at the University of Victoria.

    On March 14 the parent organization of the campus groups demanded the federal government take action against “anti-Ukrainian hate”. In “UCC calls on Government of Canada to address rising tide of anti-Ukrainian hate”, the right-wing lobby group demanded Ottawa “issue a public statement unequivocally condemning the rising pattern of hate-motivated attacks against the Ukrainian Canadian community and supporters of Ukraine; Develop and deliver programs to educate the public and counter disinformation that incites hatred against Ukrainians.” (Notwithstanding the claims, there’s likely never been greater sympathy for Ukrainian Canadians, a community that’s faced its share of discrimination, including large-scale internment during and after World War I.)

    Where have you heard this type of rhetoric before? The UCC and its campus affiliates are taking a page from the Zionist playbook. (In fact, a day after the Western Ukrainian Students’ Association denounced me, three anti-Palestinian Jewish groups released a statement that demanded “King’s University College should not provide a podium for Engler to use to spread his hateful views.”)

    Well-resourced, US empire aligned, Israel lobby groups constantly smear activists and demand events be shut down or individuals be cancelled. The recent attacks against Hamilton Centre NDP candidate (now Ontario MPP) Sarah Jama are an egregious example. They smeared the 29-year-old wheelchair bound Black female activist as anti-Jewish for having stood against apartheid. From smearing individuals to promoting an anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism, the Israel lobby promotes an identity politics infused cancel culture.

    Ironically, right-wingers who normally bash cancel culture and identity politics stay mum about the Zionist or NATO proxy warriors’ tactics.

    Groups aligned with powerful forces who seek to suppress discussion of important international issues on the grounds of their “hurt feelings” deserve criticism and contempt. Just don’t expect it to come from the usual sources in the mainstream media. They’re too busy promoting war and defending an apartheid state.

    The post Pro-Israel and Ukraine Groups Use Identity Politics to Attack Free Speech first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How and Why Obama Downed the MH17 Passenger Plane on 17 July 2014

    Before the MH17 passenger plane was shot down over the civil-war zone in Ukraine on 17 July 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama needed to persuade 9 EU countries that were opposed to adding more sanctions against Russia — needed to force them to approve adding those sanctions. He needed to supply them with ‘evidence’ that Russia was doing heinous things in Ukraine’s civil war. On 15 July 2014, Russia’s RT headlined “9 EU countries ready to block economic sanctions against Russia,” and reported that:

    France, Germany, and Italy are among EU members who don’t want to follow the US lead and impose trade sanctions on Russia. US sanctions are seen as a push to promote its own multibillion free-trade pact with Europe.

    “France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, and EU President Italy see no reason in the current environment for the introduction of sectorial trade and economic sanctions against Russia and at the summit, will block the measure,” a diplomatic source told ITAR-TASS.

    In order for a new wave of sanctions to pass, all 28 EU members must unanimously vote in favor. EU ministers plan to discuss new sanctions against Russia at their summit in Brussels on Wednesday, July 16. Even if only one country vetoed, sanctions would not be imposed. With heavyweights like France and Germany opposed to more sanctions the measure will likely again be stalled, the source said.

    After the plane was shot down, America, UK, and Ukraine immediately said that Russia and Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine did it, and then, within just a few weeks, all 9 of the EU hold-outs switched to approve the added anti-Russian sanctions that Obama wanted.

    On 5 March 2023, the independent investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg headlined “Meet the British intelligence-linked firm that warped MH17 news coverage,” and he reported how coordinated and pre-planned by British intelligence (which worked hand-in-glove with both Ukrainian and American Governments on this) the MH17 operation had been set up not just to shoot down the plane but to be backed up with faked ‘evidence’ that it had been done by Russia. (In his report, he uses undefined the acronym “JIT”: that refers to the official “Joint Investigative Team” on the downing of MH17.)

    On 7 October 2019, I had already headlined “Update on the MH17 case” and documented that Netherland’s Government had signed an “8 August 2014 agreement [never made public] with Ukraine, to find Ukraine not to have perpetrated the downing. But the families [of the 196 Dutch who had been murdered by the shoot-down] don’t know this,” and the Dutch court that was hearing the MH17 case refused to consider any other evidence, especially not from Russia, and refused to consider those families’ urgings for that court to consider any evidence that was being offered on the case — including from Russia, which the Dutch Government pre-emptively was alleging had done the shoot-down. That secret agreement was among the four members of the “Joint Investigative Team,” all four of which were ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) of the U.S. Government: “Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia.” They all agreed that the case would be tried in the Netherlands, because 196 of the 298 corpses came from there. My article links down to the evidence that Russia was wanting to present but was barred from presenting, and it also links down to evidence from the Government of Malaysia and the black boxes it had, and the MH17 pilots’ corpses that Malaysia had, all of which was likewise clear that the MH17 was shot down not by any BUK missile from Russia, but instead by a Ukrainian air force warplane that fired straight at the pilot, whose corpse was riddled with bullets. The Ukrainian warplane pilot, from whose plane those bullets were being fired, was under the command of the Ukrainian government that Obama had installed. In other words: Obama was the Commander-in-Chief of the entire operation. And it obtained its objective: on 31 July 2014, the 9 recalcitrant EU members all switched to approve the new sanctions against Russia.

    The post How and Why Obama Downed the MH17 Passenger Plane on 17 July 2014 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Deadly Disinformation – The Underreported Scandal at the New York Times



    Today’s assignment:

    You write for the most influential newspaper in America. Your recent column about COVID relied on dubious sourcing, specifically, Person A, who agreed with your personal views on the issue.

    Your opening “hook” for readers was Person A’s inaccurate and misleading statements. He characterized a medical review in which he participated (along with 11 others) as supporting your position, although the review itself stated that it didn’t.

    Your column went viral. The medical community condemned Person A’s false characterization of the review and highlighted the review’s methodological limitations and failings that your column ignored.

    Two weeks later, you doubled down on your position.

    Shortly thereafter, the review’s editor-in-chief issued a statement that Person A and many commentators had misrepresented the review’s conclusions.

    What do you do now?

    What if you’re the newspaper’s editor?

    Bret Stephens’ February 21 column on mask mandates created this scandal at the New York Times.

    How It Began

    When the next airborne pandemic strikes, the disinformation currently surrounding COVID will paralyze policymakers and the public. Both-sidesing critical mitigation measures such as masks—even when one side lacks serious factual support—has undermined science and created mass confusion.

    Over the past three weeks, Stephens and the New York Times have added to that confusion.

    The fact is that masks and mask mandates limited the spread of COVID. But Stephens claimed to have “unambiguous” proof from a recent Cochrane Library review that mandates didn’t work at all. A cursory reading of the Cochrane review abstract and authors’ summary revealed that it expressly—and repeatedly—declined to support Stephens’ position:

    • “The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions.”
    • “There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.”
    • “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.”

    Likewise before Stephens published his column, the medical community had warned that anti-maskers were misusing the Cochrane review to support their broader agenda.

    Throwing caution—and facts—to the wind, Stephens turned to Tom Jefferson, one of the review’s 12 authors. Jefferson is a senior associate tutor in the department of continuing education at the University of Oxford. He has a history of being wrong about COVID.

    As more than 50,000 Americans were dying during the month of April 2020 alone, Jefferson questioned whether the outbreak was really a pandemic or just a prolonged respiratory flu season. He continues to claim that there is no basis for saying that COVID spreads through airborne transmission, despite the fact that major public health agencies have long said otherwise. The “Declarations of interest” relating to the Cochrane mask review noted that Jefferson had voiced “an opinion on the topic of the review in articles for popular media…[and] was not involved in the editorial process for this review.”

    Ignoring the red flags, Stephens opened his column by quoting Jefferson’s inaccurate and misleading statements, starting with: “‘There is just no evidence that they’ — masks — “‘make any difference. Full stop.’”

    Then Stephens blasted CDC Director Rochelle Walensky for acknowledging the limitations in Cochrane’s review, accused her of turning the CDC into an “accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science,” and called for her resignation. He closed by saying that the review had vindicated those who fought mandates.

    The Stephens/Jefferson misleading characterization of the Cochrane review provoked widespread condemnation from the medical community and others. Two days after Stephens’ column appeared, former CDC Director Tom Frieden wrote on Twitter:

    “Community-wide masking is associated with 10-80% reductions in infections and deaths, with higher numbers associated with higher levels of mask wearing in high-risk areas.”

    How It Proliferated

    As anti-maskers weaponized Stephens’ column and it went viral, the New York Times failed to correct it:

    • The Times published four brief online letters to the editor accurately challenging Stephens’ false assertions and unsupportable conclusions.
    • The following Sunday’s print edition (February 26) boasted that Stephens’ column was one of “Last Week’s Top Trending Headlines” and noted that it “cited an analysis of Oxford studies by an Oxford epidemiologist, drew nearly 3,800 comments from readers, not all of them agreeing with him.”
    • In the February 27 installment of “The Conversation”—a weekly dialogue between Stephens and the Times’ Gail Collins—neither mentioned Stephens’ misleading column.
    • In Stephens’ next weekly column for the Times on February 28, he moved on to a new subject—Ukraine.

    The Times March 6 episode of “The Conversation” finally raised the issue. Reaffirming his incorrect position, Stephens ignored the medical community’s criticism of the Cochrane review and his column, denied relying solely on the review (even though his column cited nothing else), and dragged his fellow Times mask-mandate critic, David Leonhardt, into the fray.

    How It Unraveled

    Four days later, on March 10, Times opinion columnist Zenyep Tufekci, a journalism professor at Columbia University, published yet another detailed critique of the Cochrane review: “Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work.” She didn’t name Stephens, but she detailed facts and evidence that demolished Jefferson’s misleading claims in his column.

    Some of that evidence came from Cochrane Library’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser. She told Tufekci that Jefferson had seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks when he said that it proved that “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.”

    “[T]hat statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found,” Soares-Weiser said.

    Hours later, Soares-Weiser issued Cochrane’s statement repeating the cautionary caveats in the review itself, which “has been widely misinterpreted… Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.” (Italics in original)

    Cochrane’s statement also called out the purveyors of disinformation: “Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that ‘masks don’t work’, which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.” (Italics in original)

    How the Times Made It Worse

    The Tufekci article suggested that the Times had come down on the side of fact-based science demonstrating that masks and mandates had been effective. But on Sunday, March 12, its online edition presented mask mandates as a debatable proposition: Should we use them in the next pandemic?

    Using a “Yes” or “No” format, the Times relied on Dr. Anders Tegnell, former state epidemiologist for Sweden, to defend the “No Mask Mandate” position. Given the parameters of the hypothetical pandemic that the Times posed (only five cases of a deadly respiratory virus in a single jurisdiction and 10 cases nationwide), Tegnell said that masks should be used in health and elder care settings. He said that it was too soon for a mandate, but the decision would depend on how the situation unfolded.

    So even the “No” wasn’t really a no. The Times failed to mention that Tegnell had presided over his country’s disastrous “do-nothing” response during the first year of COVID-19, when Sweden’s COVID death rate far exceeded neighboring Nordic countries.

    How It Will Haunt Us

    Stephens moved on without remorse, but the incalculable damage left in his wake endures. Mask mandates are disappearing and won’t return any time soon, but not because they were ineffective when needed. The catastrophic consequences of Stephens’ disinformation will arrive when the next airborne virus (or COVID variant) strikes, pandemic victims overwhelm hospitals, policymakers and the public disregard science, and a proven mitigation tool remains on the shelf.

    The Times is complicit. After failing to issue a correction to Stephens’ column, it then regressed to both-sidesism. Presenting both sides of an issue as if they stand on equal, fact-based footing when they don’t is not journalism. It’s an insidious form of disinformation.

    When it involves public health, it can be deadly.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Variant Spread Conundrum

    The post The Variant Spread Conundrum first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Video Proves Joe Rogan WAS RIGHT About Bill Gates!

    Bill Gates is not a medical doctor, not a virologist, not a scientist and not even a college graduate, yet we as a society hang on his every word when it comes to proper response to a viral pandemic. Why? It probably has something to do with the millions of dollars he’s “donated” to the World Health Organization and otherwise spent to become a go-to mouthpiece for a range of financial interests, from food to vaccines. Jimmy and guest Robert F. Kennedy jr. discuss how Gates made $500 million off of the COVID vaccines he was wildly promoting, then cashed out and started acknowledging that the vaccines aren’t actually all that great.

    Follow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobertKennedyJr

    The post Video Proves Joe Rogan WAS RIGHT About Bill Gates! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Curious Case of “Mandela’s Lawyer” Illustrates Media Bias

    The story is not about Irwin Cotler lying. It’s about the media embracing a biographical detail because they support the US empire and Zionism.

    Seven years ago, the South African ambassador to Venezuela Pandit Thaninga Shope-Linney stated plainly that “Irwin Cotler was not Nelson Mandela’s lawyer.” Three years later Max Blumenthal pointed out that “in Nelson Mandela’s memoir, The Long March to Freedom, there is no mention of Irwin Cotler.” Recently Davide Mastracci demolished the claim that the establishment’s human rights darling was a lawyer for the long imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) leader.

    On its surface Mastracci’s deep dive into a decades-old biographical anecdote of an 82-year-old former justice minister may appear almost petty. But it actually offers an important window into Canadian media.

    According to Mastracci’s search of the Canadian Newsstream database, there were more than 320 results mentioning that Cotler was Mandela’s lawyer. As time has passed, the mentions have grown with 164 stories noting the biographical detail in the 2010s. “Cotler has gotten far more press coverage crediting him with representing Mandela than he ever did while he was supposedly doing the work,” notes Mastracci.

    But there’s little evidence for the Mandela lawyer claim outside Cotler’s own somewhat vague statements. In effect, the media is regurgitating a biographical detail that enhances the credibility of someone who challenges the human rights violations of enemy states.

    Not only was Cotler not Mandela’s lawyer, thousands of Canadians probably contributed more than him to the struggle against South African apartheid, which played out over three decades of Cotler’s adulthood. I asked Joanne Naiman, author of the 1984 Relations between Canada and South Africa and a leading anti-apartheid campaigner in Toronto about Cotler. Neither her nor her partner remembers interacting with Cotler. “Neil and I discussed this, and we certainly have no memory of Cotler being his lawyer, or, indeed, in any way involved in the anti-apartheid movement,” she emailed. Naiman, who was part of group aligned with the ‘terrorist’ ANC in the 1970s, reached out to Lynda Lemberg, another prominent activist in that struggle. She immediately labeled Cotler’s claim “total bullshit”.

    Even according to Cotler’s own telling he was late to the South Africa struggle. In June 1964, NDP leader Tommy Douglas told the House of Commons: “Nelson Mandela and seven of his associates have been found guilty of contravening the apartheid laws … [I] ask the Prime Minister if he will make vigorous representation to the government of South Africa urging that they exercise clemency in this case”? (Lester Pearson rejected the request) Yet, when discussing his involvement Cotler cites events that took place in the early and mid 1980s.

    Still, Cotler uses his purported role in the South Africa struggle to defend apartheid today. When members of the Quebec Movement for Peace interrupted his 2019 speech on “Canada as a Human Rights leader” Cotler responded by saying that as someone having “fought against a real apartheid regime, South Africa, it is demeaning to make a comparison [with Israel].”

    The Mandela anecdote enables Cotler’s vicious anti-Palestinianism. It also enhances the credibility of an individual who aggressively criticizes “enemy” states while largely ignoring rights violations committed by Canada and the US. Cotler’s activism feeds a propaganda system in which the media considers victims ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ depending on the prerogatives of US and Canadian foreign policy. Because he concentrates on the victims of enemy states while largely ignoring those victimized by friendly governments the dominant media regurgitate sympathetic biographical details. Sometimes they even embellish the former minister’s embellishment as John Ivison did when he claimed Cotler “was instrumental” in Mandela’s release.

    The media’s reaction to “Irwin Cotler and the Mandela Effect” has been telling. More than a month after Mastracci published his investigation, I couldn’t find any mention of it by other media.

    On Twitter Ivison, who recently published “A tireless pursuer of justice, ex-minister Cotler takes on Putin” on the front of the National Post, complained, “You’re targeting Irwin Cotler in an ‘expose’? Give me a break. If there was an Olympics for good human beings, Irwin would pip the Pope for gold.” Apparently, Ivison doesn’t believe journalists should investigate the claims of powerful figures and instead stick to fawning puff pieces.

    At the more liberal end of the dominant media, ‘misinformation’ expert Justin Ling tweeted that Mastracci failed to mention archival articles, which were either in fact mentioned or irrelevant. For his part, the head of media watchdog group CANADALAND, Jesse Brown, called the investigation “pretty thin”. But the 3,500 word story, which includes an interview with Cotler, is anything but “thin”. Brown’s reaction reflects his refusal to seriously address the anti-Palestinian bias in Canadian media or its most flagrant deference to the US Empire. Instead of simply dismissing his work as “thin”, Brown should build on Mastracci’s research by interviewing the many grassroots activists who led the South Africa campaign in Canada to ask if they remember working with Cotler.

    Irrespective of his Mandela lawyer tale, it’s long been clear that Cotler is a “fraud”, as I told him during the opening screening of First to Stand: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler in December. Cotler has supported NATO’s destruction of Libya, bloodstained dictator Paul Kagame, and the ouster of Venezuela’s government. A staunch Jewish supremacist, Cotler justifies Israeli colonialism and violence.

    Cotler’s a darling of the political and media establishment. At the end of last year NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson met with Cotler twice over a two-week period tweeting, “this afternoon, Professor Irwin Cotler and I spoke about how we can work together to protect human rights in Canada and around the world. I am grateful to him for sharing his wisdom with me.” Previous NDP foreign critics Hélène Laverdière and Guy Caron, as well as Green Party leader Elizabeth May, participated in press conferences organized by Cotler and a number of them joined the Cotler-led Raoul Wallenberg All-Party Parliamentary Caucus for Human Rights. After we interrupted Cotler for about 10 minutes at Concordia University in 2019 Conservative MP David Sweet asked the House of Commons to condemn the disruption and celebrate Cotler (pro-Israel media claimed it was unanimous).

    It will be interesting to follow coverage of Cotler’s biographical anecdote in the coming months. With significant recent media interest in politicians and public figures making up biographical details, will an intrepid reporter build on Mastracci’s research? Or will journalists continue to refer to Cotler as Mandela’s lawyer?

    My bet is the latter. The ‘Cotler Mandela’s lawyer’ claim is likely to continue appearing since it serves a media sphere steeped in imperialism and Zionism.

    The post Curious Case of “Mandela’s Lawyer” Illustrates Media Bias first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • All US Presidents are War Criminals

    This is a US war on Russia. Period.

    We have to be very clear, even to the point of being blunt. By ‘we’ I mean those of us involved who are conscious of being part of an Information War–the propaganda war that we are recipients of—on the receiving end of this tsunami of crap. We have to say things flat without fear and without compromise. This is a US war on Russia. Period. Now why do we have to say this? Why should we say it so bluntly?

    The propaganda matrix is so powerful that people, especially within the bubble–that is, within what people call NATOstan. This is the ‘civilized’ world, 15% of the human population. The West. People are so confused and so propagandized that it’s almost as if they have no sense of pattern recognition, or have never read a chapter book. This is a war, a US war against Russia. Why? Because the US is NATO. What is NATO? NATO is a Horribles Parade costume, it’s a Halloween mask. It’s just the US–the extension of the US military around the world by another name. Pure and simple.

    Now when you find all of these things that they’re finding, all the material, all of the connections and the proof that NATO is much more involved than they claim. This is to say that the US is involved. This is the extension of the US. Again: why? Because the US is at war with everybody. The US is involved in its forever war against every*body* and every*thing.* Sometimes the mask slips and people see it. But they hide behind proxies, they hide behind local conflicts, they make it seems like they are doing something else. But they are involved.

    Anglo-US Empire struggling to keep things as they are

    The United States Empire, the inheritors of the UK Empire–so the Anglo-US Empire is involved in a struggle to keep things as they are. They are in the very last throes the death throes I think–of a 500-year history of slaughter and plunder that has kept all of the wealth in the world funneling upwards to them. And the question is not it can they do it, but rather why can’t they see that it’s a completely impossible thing.

    US to send $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine

    The US announced on 5 April that it would send up to $100 million in additional military aid to Ukraine.

    This is a war against time, against history. Think of the unimaginable arrogance it takes to think that you can freeze time. Why are they going to fail? Because no Empire has succeeded in freezing time. You’re done! It’s over–leave the stage politely, with a gracious bow and support what’s coming next. But no. The unspeakable hubris it takes not only to try to shape the development of life, but to stop it. and this is how you know that they are at work. They’re at work in Ukraine; but that’s not enough: while they’re doing that, they have to try to overthrow Imran Khan in Pakistan. They have to go and threaten Modi in India not to pay too much in Rubles with Russia. Not to have too much Rupee-Ruble shenanigans because we don’t like that, right?

    They try to threaten Orban in Hungary by having the EU accuse them of erosion of democracy. Orban’s great crime is to say he’s going to be closer to Russia. Same with Vuccic in Serbia. You know, these are people who are our increasingly not going to be cowed.

    I don’t know exactly why–within the bubble–why people are so malleable. I mean it’s really incredible how susceptible people are in the Western so-called democracies, where the news is so censored and so filtered that it’s a wonder that they know anything at all. They have this farce–they are pumping up support for this chapter of the Forever War (which they call the Ukraine War) by advertising it in an award show. They have Zelensky prost…ing himself by appearing at the Grammy’s! The National Gallery changes the title of Degas’ work to say Ukrainian Dancers instead of Russian Dancers. Then all the stuff I’ve talked about before, the boycott on Russian vodka, what have you. Whatever. And they are so deep in this–this is inside the bubble–that you cannot talk about any of the real things that are happening.

    Yes, there are Nazis! How do we know? Because the US has been working with them since the 1940s. And with their parents and their grandparents. There’s no secret about this. Even these liberal intellectuals and so-called politically conscious and aware types would have admitted this. This was not controversial even a year or two ago. There were articles everywhere about the Nazi problem in Ukraine, about using the Nazis. Again we come back the notion of pattern recognition. Why are they so surprised? Why is it such a shock?

    Somoza was a Nazi. In Chile Pinochet was a Nazi. They always use these people as their proxies. Why would Ukraine be any different? Maybe it’s because de-Nazification was never really finished in Germany to begin with. They didn’t really like it too much the first time around because defeating communism became more important. Meh. Nazi, schmazi. We took Werner Von Braun, which Tom Lehrer even wrote a song about. De-Nazification, say in Bavaria: 75% of the Nazis identified were rehabilitated. Then they formed the CSU which was part of the basis for Adenauer’s first government.

    Why the US attempted to topple Pakistan’s government

    The US attempted to topple the government of Pakistani PM Imran Khan because “he would not allow US military bases there and because he will not toe the line on Russia.”

    It was never taken seriously and there were always greater threats. Communism was a greater threat. Why is there a Red Scare in the US but the German Bund was allowed to have its Nazis twenty-five thousand strong at Madison Square Garden? We’ve always known which side they were on. They were never serious about it and they’re not serious now. So what is interesting is how the rest of the world thinks. Because they have never been stupid about any of this.

    The American Empire is in a war against humanity

    Europeans love to talk about the Cold War. Well, it wasn’t that cold—ask the people in Vietnam whether it was cold or hot. Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar. Or Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador? Argentina–the Dirty War. Chile—the disappeared. Algeria, Uganda, Rwanda with the divisions that were sown by the Empire. Angola, Mozambique, South Africa itself. The Congo with King Leopold’s murderous reign and NATO’s role in the killing of Lumumba. Palestine? I mean seriously? Are these people serious? The US president gets to call the Russian president a thug and a war criminal? All US presidents are war criminals! This is why when people asked why are we so confident not only when we say it’s a US war against Russia, US war against the world. Why then are we all so sanguine that they will lose, these forces that are trying to stop time?

    It comes back to all the same philosophers is that Dr. King quoted: William Cullen Bryant, the truth crushed to earth will rise again or Thomas Carlyle no lie can live forever. All these things are still true. Ukraine is NATO is the US. The Africans know it, the Indians know it, the Chinese know it, the South Americans and Central Americans know it. This is 85% of humanity. The American Empire is in a war against humanity.

    So how are we so sure, when I hear about the particulars–you have to zoom in every once in awhile. The Maternity Hospital in Mariupol being bombed? Well I don’t know how; I’ll wait and see. Then the model appears in an interview and says it was Ukrainians. The ghost of Kiev? Hmmm, I’m not sure…turns out to be a video game. The Snake Island Heroes who died so heroically yet wound up being videotaped later on having surrendered. The Russian bombing of the Zaporozhie power plant story which Russians were guarding turned out to be too risible to be true. Now this current massacre where bodies are sitting up and waving at the camera. You know, you have to wait because they’ve always use these tricks. It’s not new–pattern recognition! The next chapter–look ahead and sneak a peek at the cliff notes, if you want to stay sane and stay alive.

    And then you have the people involved who want us to feel guilty: the pressure! The pressure to be anti-Russia on the people inside the West… Now, outside people are a little bit freer, so it’s a push back against that that hubris, having been NATO’s victims. Having been subjects of the hot side of the Cold War, they will just tell NATO and the US, as my father said, to take a long walk off a short pier. It is absolutely clear, and we have to present it as such. Or, to quote an Afro-Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin: Для меня/ Так это ясно, как простая гамма. this is as clear to me as a simple sum. And we have to stay strong, and keep our eyes on the fight of our lives, the lives of humanity and the life of the whole world. History is on our side.

    The post All US Presidents are War Criminals first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Calling the Overthrow of Yanukovych a U.S. Coup is True

    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:

    “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

    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 tweeted quoting 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.

    To top it all off: on February 25, another budding U.S. politician, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is apparently entering the U.S. Presidential primaries campaigning for the Republican (traditional fascist) nomination, by tweeting:

    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.

    The post Calling the Overthrow of Yanukovych a U.S. Coup is True first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Power Alliance Says It’s Preparing An “Information War” Against China

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    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.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    US, Allies Plan for Information War with China
    by Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman@KyleAnzalone_ @FreemansMind96 #China https://t.co/T4BSB3Rvfk pic.twitter.com/WEzWQWkDmF

    — Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) February 22, 2023

    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.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    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

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 7, 2022

    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.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    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

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 5, 2023

    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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  • “That Paper Is Dead”

    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.’

    Kennard added:

    ‘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.

    On 9 February, Monbiot tweeted:

    ‘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.’

    We replied:

    ‘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.

    The post “That Paper Is Dead” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

    Orientation

    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 Propaganda thinks 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

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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 Censored comes 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:

    1. Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
    2. Journalists investigating the Financial Crimes Threatened by Elites
    3. Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Worker Rights
    4. Google’s Union-Busting Methods Revealed
    5. Police Use of Dogs as Instruments of Violence Targets People of Color
    6. Corporate Media Sideline Health Experts during Pandemic
    7. US Factory Farming a Breeding Ground for Next Pandemic
    8. New Wave of Independent News Sources Demonized by Google-Owned You Tube
    9. Conservative Christian Groups Spend Globally to Promote Anti-LGBTQ Campaigns
    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    1. 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.

    The post Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Intellectuals and the Imperialist Affairs

    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.

    1. Killing of the unarmed Arman Aliverdi, a member of Basij Militia, here and here. The last forty seconds of this footage shows the killing of the unarmed member of Basij militia Rooholah Ajamian. An ordinary citizen is accused of being a member of Basij militia and beaten into coma by the mob. Burning of an unarmed policeman and an ambulance. Here and here.
    2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2008), p. 234
    3. Here and here and here.
    4. 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.
    5. Sartre, p.235-236.
    6. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’,” in Selected Writings, Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.35.
    7. Marx, p.37-38.
    8. Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics, From Europe to Iran, (New York, Palgrave Macmillan 2018.), p. 206.
    9. Sartre, p.239-240
    10. According to the US-funded Radio Farda, 56 Iranian security forces were killed during the protests. Iranian government published names and pictures of 63 persons claimed to be killed by the rioters and ISIS’s attack on a Shiite shrine in Shiraz, Iran.
    11. Paul Nizan, Les Chiens de Garde (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1965), p. 58-60.
    12. Sartre, p. 292-294.
    The post Intellectuals and the Imperialist Affairs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The American Crisis of Trust—Let’s Learn from Leading Democracies



    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.