Category: Propaganda

  • In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25).

    Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25).

    The post For Media, Unruly Protesters Are Bigger Problem Than Police State appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Elections in Latin America are often controversial. While many countries in the Global North regularly shuffle between parties offering alternating versions of neoliberalism, voting in Central and South America often offers starker contrasts: An anti-imperialist candidate in the mold of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez might be up against a neoliberal such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It could hardly be otherwise, in a region with the world’s biggest gap between the richest and poorest.

    North American and European corporate media are conscious of this complexity, but rarely convey it to their readers, instead issuing reports that lack sufficient context or history.

    The post When Media Tell Us Who ‘Won’ A Latin American Election, Ask Questions appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I’d be happy to kiss a frog even if I don’t get a prince. I’ve always found frogs to be charming creatures. From fat, croaking toads to agile jumpers, these amphibians never fail to make me smile. Frogs can leap more than 20 feet, and some can even get you high. But I’ve got to say, my favorite is the fire-bellied toad. If its distinctive spots and badass name don’t make you appreciate it, its bright red underside will.

    The coolest thing about the fire-bellied toad is how I first learned about it. Kim Yo-jung—the North Korean politician and diplomat—told me about the toads in a Q&A on social media. She’s not some boogeyman; she has a Facebook account. She’s patient when there’s good faith, and she was very polite both times I’ve asked her a question. 

    Fire-bellied Toad

    Western media depicts the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as backward and evil, but this is just a continuation of Cold War red scare propaganda. Media constantly uses language that undermines the DPRK’s perceived legitimacy. They call it North Korea and describe its political leaders as being in a “regime.” They leave out the words democratic and republic because those words don’t fit their narrative. 

    Western pundits intentionally mistranslate Korean whenever it suits them. Another way of saying “prime minister” is “supreme leader;” they use the latter because it sounds less democratic, despite meaning the same thing. They even make things up entirely. There’s no ban on hairstyles in the DPRK, though western media will run stories claiming that only eight hairstyles are allowed. 

    When I first asked Kim Yo-jung about creatures indigenous to Korea, I was expecting some kind of mammal—something large and intimidating. The fire-bellied toad symbolizes the DPRK better than any large aggressor. The toad shows its namesake off as a warning to potential threats; it’s not looking for a fight, but it will defend itself. While it’s not naturally poisonous, consuming bugs in the wild causes them to secrete poison; they are only dangerous because of their environment. That poison comes in handy: it wards away larger and scarier predators. 

    During the Korean War, NATO—led by the United States—invaded Korea and ended up splitting the country in half. Half of their country was taken and occupied by the USA. US troops have invaded and killed people in Korea, yet no DPRK soldier has ever stepped foot on American soil with the intent of killing someone.  

    NATO was not the first to invade Korea; the history of Korea is the history of being subjugated by larger powers. Until NATO interfered, Korea was almost unified. Japan had been kicked out a few years prior after several decades of occupation, and the Korean People’s Army (KPA) had surrounded the remaining South Korean troops. NATO invaded and cut off the KPA, forcing them to retreat across the 38th parallel. NATO still has troops in the Republic of Korea. South Korea is a neocolony under the control of larger Western countries. 

    Before I knew about the fire-bellied toad, my favorite frogs were Vietnamese mossy frogs. These little things are just stunning, truly a wonderful creation of nature. The mossy frogs are all threatened or endangered and would have fared worse if the US hadn’t been defeated in a war that destroyed animals and vegetation as well as the people of Vietnam. Understanding how Vietnam won its independence is crucial to understanding why the DPRK acts the way it does. 

    Vietnamese mossy frog

    In his essay The Path that Led Me to Leninism, Ho Chi Minh posed a question to decide who he should align with. He asked, “Which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries?” to which he was told it was Lenin’s Third International. This would lead Ho to new allies and a new way of thinking. Marxist-Leninism guided him in starting the movement that would liberate Vietnam from both French and US occupation, although Ho himself would not live to see a free Vietnam. 

    All of Vietnam is liberated, so now there’s not much need for manufacturing hatred towards the Vietnamese. On the other hand, Korea is still split and NATO would love to control the entire peninsula. So, media in NATO countries present things to make their enemies look bad. They need a population willing to go to the other side of the planet just to kill people. And they need the rest of us, who aren’t so zealous, to just accept war whenever and wherever they want. Racism isn’t just slurs and personal discrimination; racism is also believing baseless accusations against entire races. 

    Simply not being racist isn’t enough, we must be actively anti-racist. Being opposed to racism means loudly denouncing what racists are doing—even when it loses you friends. It’s opposing colonization in any form it takes. It’s standing in solidarity with colonized people wherever they are. That’s why I became a Marxist-Leninist: because when somebody asks who stands with colonized people, I want to be in the group they point to. 

    Pyongyang metro station

    Once you unlearn what you were taught about Korea and start to really understand it, you can see how much they’ve overcome. The DPRK has never brought criminal charges against one of its citizens for their gender or sexuality. It has gorgeous architecture and beautiful cityscapes. The subway system at Pyongyang station makes the New York Metro look like a garbage dump. Kim Jong-il is an excellent writer, and I highly recommend his book On the Juche Idea if you want to understand how they see the world and their method for interacting with it. 

    The more I learn about the DPRK, the more I admire them. They were occupied by China, then Japan, and then NATO. But despite their country’s small size, they managed to survive and hang on by adapting to their environment. The next time you hear something bad about “North Korea,” try to remember that opinion was manufactured. The next time you see a frog, remember that no matter how small you are, there’s always hope for you to persevere against the largest and most powerful enemies. 

    Zeta Mail

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • The New York Times has just published one of the most insane headlines I have ever seen it publish, which is really saying something.

    Gaza’s Deadly Aid Deliveries,” the title blares.

    If you were among the majority of people who only skim the headline without reading the rest of the article, you would have no idea that Israel has spent the last few days massacring starving civilians at aid sites and lying about it. You would also have no idea that it is Israel who’s been starving them in the first place.

    https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1930322086767276353

    The headline is written in such a passive, amorphous way that it sounds like the aid deliveries themselves are deadly. Like the bags of flour are picking up assault rifles and firing on desperate Palestinians queuing for food or something.

    The sub-headline is no better: “Israel’s troops have repeatedly shot near food distribution sites.”

    Oh? They’ve shot “near” food distribution sites, have they? Could their discharging their weapons in close proximity to the aid sites possibly have something to do with the aforementioned deadliness of the aid deliveries? Are we the readers supposed to connect these two pieces of information for ourselves, or are we meant to view them as two separate data points which may or may not have anything to do with one another?

    The article itself makes it clear that Israel has admitted that IDF troops fired their weapons “near” people waiting for aid after they failed to respond to “warning shots”, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened here. But in mainstream publications, the headlines are written by editors, not by the journalists who write the articles. So, they get to frame the story in whatever way suits their propaganda agenda for the majority who never read past the headline.

    https://x.com/AssalRad/status/1925342359912685809

    We saw another amazingly manipulative New York Times headline last month, “Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank,” about the IDF firing “warning shots” at a delegation of foreign officials attempting to visit Jenin.

    This was a story that provoked outcry and condemnation throughout the Western world, but look at the lengths the New York Times editor went to in order to frame the IDF’s actions in the most innocent way possible. They were firing into the air. They were firing “to disperse western diplomats”—like that’s a thing. Like diplomats are crows on a cornfield or something. Oh yeah, ya know ya get too many diplomats flockin’ around and ya gotta fire a few rounds to disperse ’em. Just normal stuff.

    It’s amazing how creative these freaks get when they need to exonerate Israel and its Western allies of their crimes publicly. The IDF commits a war crime, and suddenly these stuffy mass media editors who’ve never created any art in their lives transform into poets, bending and twisting the English language to come up with lines that read more like Zen koans than reporting on an important news event.

    It’s impossible to have too much disdain for these people.

    The post Zen And The Art Of New York Times Headline Writing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The post Israel is Fully Integrating its Gaza “Food Aid Hubs” into the Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.

    At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.

    The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez; and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.

    The post Ballots And Bias: How The Press Framed Venezuela’s Elections. appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.

    Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates

    At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.

    The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez, and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.

    Likewise, the Chavista alliance swept the National Assembly, securing 253 out of 285 seats. Notable exceptions were the election of opposition leaders Henrique Capriles and Henri Falcón, both of whom are former presidential candidates.

    The New York Times reported the same outcomes but spun it as the “results [rather than the vote]…stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held,” inferring fraud.

    However, this election outcome was not unexpected, as the opposition was not only divided but also had a significant portion opting to boycott the vote. The pro-government forces enjoyed a unified effort, an efficient electoral machine, and grassroots support, especially from the communal movement.

    “After 32 elections, amidst blockades, criminal sanctions, fascism and violence,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro affirmed, “today we showed that the Bolivarian Revolution is stronger than ever.”

    Opposition self-implodes

    The headline from Le Monde spun the voting thus: “Venezuela holds divisive new elections.” Contrary to what the headline suggests, the divisiveness was not the government’s doing, but due to the opposition’s perennial internecine warfare.

    While the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole alliance around the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) “works in unison,” according to opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the electoral opposition is divided into three warring camps. They, in turn, were surrounded by a circular firing squad of the far-right abstentionists, calling for a vote boycott.

    The abstentionists were assembled around Maria Corina Machado. She had been pardoned for her involvement in the short-lived 2002 US-backed coup but was subsequently disqualified from running for office for constitutional offenses. Following Washington’s lead, which has not recognized a Venezuelan presidential election as legitimate since 2012, the far-right opposition rejected electoral means for achieving regime change and has even pleaded in effect for US military intervention.

    Machado’s faction, which claimed that Edmund González Urrutia won the 2024 presidential election, does not recognize their country’s constitutional authority. Consequently, when summoned by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, they refused to present evidence of their victory, thereby removing any legal basis for their claimed victory to be accepted. Machado maintained that voting only “legitimizes” the government, bitterly calling those participating in the democratic process “scorpions.”

    Machado spent the election in self-imposed hiding. She further dug herself into a hole, after urging even harsher punishing US sanctions on her own people, by appearing to support Trump’s sending of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador.

    El Pais sympathized with her as “driven by the strength of the pain of being a mother who has been separated from her three children.” The WaPo described the middle-aged divorcé from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela as a “courageous leader” whose “three children are exiled abroad.” In fact, her adult children live comfortably in the US and Colombia.

    To this manufactured sympathy for the privileged, Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor asks, “Where are the defenders of the human rights of Venezuelans?” She excoriates the collective West for its selective concern for human rights, emphasizing the neglect of Venezuelans’ rights amid external pressures and US sanctions.

    The disputed Essequibo

    The headline for The New York Times’s report spun the elections with: “Venezuela is holding an election for another country’s land.” This refers to the elections for governor and legislators in Essequibo (Guayana Esequiba in Spanish), which is, in fact, a disputed land.

    For nearly two centuries, Venezuelans have considered that region part of their country, having wrested it from Spanish colonialists in 1835. In the questionable Paris Arbitral Award, with the US representing Venezuela, the Essequibo was handed over to the UK in 1899 (then colonial British Guiana and now the independent nation of Guyana). Ever since, it has been contested territory.

    In 1962, Venezuela formally revived its claim at the UN, asserting that the 1899 award was null and void. Not surprisingly, the Times sides with Guyana, or more precisely with what they report as “Exxon Mobil’s multibillion-dollar investments” plus “military ties with the US.”

    This first-time vote for political representation in the Essequibo is seen by Venezuelans across their political spectrum as an important step to assert their claim. It follows a referendum in 2023, which affirmed popular support for the Essequibo as part of their national territory. The actual voting was held in the neighboring Bolivar state.

    On cue, the western-aligned press criticized the vote on the Essequibo as a “cynical ploy” by the Maduro administration to divert attention from other pressing problems. Meanwhile, they obscure the increasing US military penetration in neighboring Guyana and in the wider region.

    Yet even the NYT had to admit: “Claims to the Essequibo region are deeply ingrained among many Venezuelans… [and even] María Corina Machado, the most prominent opposition leader, visited the area by canoe in 2013 to advance Venezuela’s claim.” Venezuelan journalist Jésus Rodríguez Espinoza (pers. comm.) described the vote as “an exercise in national sovereignty.”

    Illegal sanctions – the elephant in the room

    WaPo opinion piece claims, “that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom,” as if the US and its allies have not imposed sanctions deliberately designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. These “unilateral coercive measures,” condemned by the UN, are illegal under international law because they constitute collective punishment.

    But the fact that Venezuelans had to vote while being subjected to illegal coercion is completely ignored by the corporate press. That is, the existence of sanctions is recognized, but instead of exposing their illegal and coercive essence, the press normalizes them. The story untold by the press is the courage of the Venezuelan people who continue to support their government under such adverse conditions.

    Disparaging the election

    Washington and its aligned press cannot question the popular sweep for the Socialist Party’s alliance in Venezuela, because it is so obvious. Nonetheless, they disparage the mandate. The chorus of criticism alleges the fraudulent nature of previous elections, although it is a geopolitical reality that Washington considers any popular vote against its designated candidates illegitimate.

    For this particular election, these State Department stenographers focused on the supposedly low turnout. In fact, the turnout was typical for a non-presidential election contest and fell within the same percentage range as US midterm elections.

    Moreover, the pro-government slate actually garnered more votes than it had in the previous regional elections. The Chavista core of older, working class women remains solid.

    When Elvis Amoroso, president of Venezuela’s authority (CNE), qualified the turnout percentages to apply to “active voters,” he meant those in-country. Due to the large number of recent out-migrations, a significant number are registered but cannot vote because they are abroad.

    What was notably low was the voting for the highly divided opposition, with major factions calling for a boycott. Further, the opposition had been discredited by revelations that some had received and misused hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID. More than ever, the inept opposition has exposed itself in a negative light to the broad electorate. 

    The overwhelming sentiment on the street in Venezuela is for an end to partisan conflict and for continuing the slow economic recovery. Challenges ahead include inflationary winds, a rising unofficial dollar exchange rate, and, above all, the animus of the Trump administration, which is currently in internal debate over whether to try to deal the Bolivarian Revolution a quick or a slow death. Either way, destabilization efforts continue.

    To which Socialist Party leader and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said: “No one can stop our people. Not sanctions, nor blockades, nor persecution – because when a people decide to be free, no one can stop them.”

    The post Ballots and Bias: How the Press Framed Venezuela’s Regional and Legislative Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Anti-imperialists, socialists, and peace and justice communities across Africa and the world are inspired by the newly federated Alliance of Sahel States and by its leaders, especially Burkina Faso’s charismatic Ibrahim Traoré. Seeing this groundswell of support, Paul Kagame’s propagandists have rushed to liken him to Traoré. Others may sincerely imagine a likeness that doesn’t in fact exist.

    Kagame has ruled Rwanda for 30 years, since seizing power at the end of his four-year war to re-establish Tutsi dominance in July 1994. Traoré has been in power for less than three years, since seizing power in a popular coup in September 2022.

    The post Propaganda Watch: Kagame Is Not Traoré appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Against the backdrop of the recent India-Pakistan armed conflict, Iranian media and Pakistani social media handles shared a video claiming that Pakistan army had destroyed the Adani-owned Hazira port in Gujarat by attacking it with multiple missiles.

    Iran-based media organisation Tasnim News posted the video on its official X handle @Tasnimnews_Fa claiming that a fire had broken out at an Indian airbase in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat after a Pakistani airstrike. (Archived link)

    Jackson Hinkle, an American political commentator, influencer and host of the show Legitimate Targets, also made the same claim by sharing a video on X (formerly Twitter). The post was later deleted. (Archived link)

    Several Pakistani handles @AthSa01, @Rahil__AD, @_iMAKsays also claimed that the Adani Airport in Gujarat had been destroyed.

    Fact Check

    Alt News performed a reverse image search with some key frames of the viral video. This led us to a news report by The Irish Sun published on July 7, 2021. Alongside a screenshot of the viral video, the report states that the sound of the explosion in the ‘oil tanker’ at Dubai’s Jebel Ali port was heard several miles away and glass from several nearby buildings also shattered due to its impact.

    According to a report by Al Jazeera, a container ship docked at Jebel Ali Port, one of the world’s largest ports, caught fire after an explosion in Dubai, the commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates, on July 7, 2021. The Dubai Media Office (DMO) reported that the fire was eventually brought under control and there were no casualties, stating that the cause of the explosion was unknown.

    Alt News also noticed that X user Saeed M from Dubai had shared this video on July 8, 2021, claiming it to be of the Jebel Ali Port in Dubai.

    To sum it up, this viral video actually depicts the explosion of an oil container at Dubai’s Jebel Ali port 4 years ago. Some media outlets and Pakistani users are sharing it with the false claim that the Gujarat port was destroyed in Pakistani retaliation following ‘Operation Sindoor’.

    ALSO READ: Pakistani accounts released fake video claiming that 52 Indian Army soldiers were killed

    The post Pak propaganda: 2021 Dubai fire video shared as Adani-owned Hazira port gutted in missile attack appeared first on Alt News.


    This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Pawan Kumar.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gabriel Hetland’s article “Capitalism and authoritarianism in Maduro’s Venezuela,” published in New Labor Forum and reposted at LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, presents a one-sided and decontextualised view of Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro. According to Hetland, the Maduro government is virtually devoid of any redeeming characteristics. Hetland refers approvingly to the claim made by Maduro’s harshest critics on the left, that his government and the right-wing opposition are “two sides of the same coin”.

    Yet any serious examination of Venezuela under Maduro needs to incorporate the impact of US-imposed economic sanctions into its analysis and not simply make passing reference to them.

    The post A Simplistic Analysis Of The Maduro Government Leaves Much Unsaid appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The brief freeze and rapid partial reinstatement of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding in early 2025 helped expose it as a US regime-change tool. Created to rebrand CIA covert operations as “democracy promotion,” the NED channels government funds to opposition groups in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, meddling in their internal affairs.

    Regime change on the US agenda

     In 2018, Kenneth Wollack bragged to the US Congress that the NED had given political training to 8,000 young Nicaraguans, many of whom were engaged in a failed attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Wollack was praising the “democracy-promotion” work carried out by NED, of which he is now vice-chair. Carl Gershman, then president of the NED and giving evidence, was asked about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, who had been re-elected with an increased majority two years prior. He responded: “Time for him to go.”

    Seven years later, Trump took office and it looked as if the NED’s future was endangered. On February 12, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Elon Musk froze disbursement of its congressionally approved funds. Its activities stopped and its website went blank. On February 24, Richard Grenell, special envoy to Venezuela, declared that “Donald Trump is someone who does not want to make regime changes.”

    Washington’s global regime-change operations were immediately impacted and over 2,000 paid US collaborating organizations temporarily defunded. A Biden-appointed judge warned of “potentially catastrophic harm” to (not in her words) US efforts to overturn foreign governments. The howl from the corporate press was deafening. The Associated Press cried: “‘Beacon of freedom’ dims as US initiatives that promote democracy abroad wither.”

    However, the pause lasted barely a month. On March 10, funding was largely reinstated.  The NED, which “deeply appreciated” the State Department’s volte face, then made public its current program which, in Latin America and the Caribbean alone, includes over 260 projects costing more than $40 million.

    US “soft power”

    Created in 1983 under President Ronald Reagan following scandals involving the CIA’s covert funding of foreign interventions, the NED was to shift such operations into a more publicly palatable form under the guise of “democracy promotion.” As Allen Weinstein, NED’s first acting president, infamously admitted in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In short, NED functions as a “soft power arm” of US foreign policy.

    The NED disingenuously operates as a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit foundation. However, it is nearly 100% funded by annual appropriations from the US Congress and governed mainly by Washington officials or ex-officials. In reality, it is an instrument of the US state—and, arguably, of the so-called deep state. But its quasi-private status shields it from many of the disclosure requirements that typically apply to taxpayer-funded agencies.

    Hence we encounter verbal gymnastics such as those in its “Duty of Care and Public Disclosure Policies.” That document loftily proclaims: “NED holds itself to high standards of transparency and accountability.” Under a discussion of its “legacy” (with no mention of its CIA pedigree), the NGO boasts: “Transparency has always been central to NED’s identity.”

    But it continues, “…transparency for oversight differs significantly from transparency for public consumption.” In other words, it is transparent to the State Department but not to the public. The latter are only offered what it euphemistically calls a “curated public listing of grants” – highly redacted and lacking in specific details.

    NED enjoys a number of advantages by operating in the nether region between an accountable US government agency and a private foundation. It offers plausible deniability: the US government can use it to support groups doing its bidding abroad without direct attribution, giving Washington a defense from accusations of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It is also more palatable for foreign institutions to partner with what is ostensibly an NGO, rather than with the US government itself.

    The NED can also respond quickly if regime-change initiatives are needed in countries on Washington’s enemy list, circumventing the usual governmental budgeting procedures. And, as illustrated during that congressional presentation in 2018 on Nicaragua, NED’s activities are framed as supporting democracy, human rights, and civil society. It cynically invokes universal liberal values while promoting narrow Yankee geopolitical interests. Thus its programs are sold as altruistic rather than imperial, and earn positive media headlines like the one from the AP cited above.

    But a look at NED’s work in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba suggests very much the opposite.

    Venezuela

     Venezuela had passed an NGO Oversight Law in 2024. Like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, but somewhat less restrictive, the law requires certification of NGOs. As even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – an inside-the-beltway promoter of US imperialism with a liberal gloss –  admits: “Many Venezuelan organizations receiving US support have not been public about being funding recipients.”

    The pace of Washington’s efforts in Venezuela temporarily slowed with the funding pause, as US-funded proxies had to focus on their own survival. Venezuelan government officials, cheering the pause, viewed the NED’s interference in their internal affairs as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. In contrast, the US-funded leader of the far-right opposition, Maria Corina Machado, begged for international support to make up for the shortfall from Washington.

    WOLA bemoaned that the funding freeze allowed the “Maduro government to further delegitimize NGOs” paid by the US. Hundreds of US-funded organizations, they lamented, “now face the grim choice of going underground, relocating abroad, or shutting down operations altogether.”

    With the partial reinstatement of funding, now bankrolling at least 39 projects costing $3.4 million, former US senator and present NED board member Mel Martinez praised the NED for its “tremendous presence in Venezuela… supporting the anti-Maduro movement.”

    Nicaragua

     Leading up to the 2018 coup attempt, the NED had funded 54 projects worth over $4 million. Much of this went to support supposedly “independent” media, in practice little more than propaganda outlets for Nicaragua’s opposition groups. Afterward, the NED-funded online magazine Global Americans revealed that the NED had “laid “the groundwork for insurrection” in Nicaragua.

    One of the main beneficiaries, Confidencial, is owned by the Chamorro family, two of whose members later announced intentions to stand in Nicaragua’s 2021 elections. The family received well over $5 million in US government funding, either from the NED or directly from USAID (now absorbed into the State Department). In 2022, Cristiana Chamorro, who handled much of this funding, was found guilty of money laundering. Her eight-year sentence was commuted to house arrest; after a few months she was given asylum in the US.

    Of the 22 Nicaragua-related projects which NED has resumed funding, one third sponsor “independent” media. While the recipients’ names are undisclosed, it is almost certain that this funding is either for outlets like Confidencial (now based in Costa Rica), or else is going direct to leading opponents of the Sandinista government to pay for advertisements currently appearing in Twitter and other social media.

    Cuba

     In Latin America, Cuba is targeted with the highest level of NED spending – $6.6 million covering 46 projects. One stated objective is to create “a more well-informed, critically minded citizenry,” which appears laughable to anyone who has been to Cuba and talked to ordinary people there – generally much better informed about world affairs than a typical US citizen.

    Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez criticized the NED’s destabilizing activities, such as financing 54 anti-Cuba organizations since 2017. He advised the US administration to review “how many in that country [the US] have enriched themselves organizing destabilization and terrorism against Cuba with support from that organization.”

    Washington not only restored NED funding for attacks on Cuba but, on May 15, added Cuba to the list of countries that “do not fully cooperate with its anti-terrorist efforts.”

     The NED: Covert influence in the name of democracy

     Anyone with a basic familiarity with the Washington’s workings is likely to be aware of the NED’s covert role. Yet the corporate media – behaving as State Department stenographers and showing no apparent embarrassment – have degenerated to the point where they regularly portray the secretly funded NED outlets as “independent” media serving the targeted countries.

    Case in point: Washington Post columnist Max Boot finds it “sickening” that Trump is “trying [to] end US government support for democracy abroad.” He is concerned because astroturf “democracy promotion groups” cannot exist without the flow of US government dollars. He fears the “immense tragedy” of Trump’s executive order to cut off funding (now partially reinstated) for the US Agency for Global Media, the parent agency of the Voice of America, Radio Marti, and other propaganda outlets.

    Behind the moralistic appeals to democracy promotion and free press is a defense of the US imperial project to impose itself on countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. Those sanctioned countries, targeted for regime change, need free access to food, fuel, medicines and funding for development. They don’t need to hear US propaganda beamed to them or generated locally by phonily “independent” media.

    The post US Reinstates Funding to Propaganda Outlet first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In Danish here for Danish readers.

    The development – or decline – of the Danish daily newspaper Politiken as a quality newspaper in the field of foreign policy pains me. Allow me a personal, somewhat nostalgic introduction. I wrote frequently for Politiken from 1971 to 1994. As a 20-year-old sociology student, I was naturally proud to be published in what was then a prestigious, liberal media outlet, which was initially shaped by Hørup’s anti-militarism and cultural radicalism.

    In Denmark, there was a – albeit quite traditional but serious and multifaceted – discussion about the state of the world. There was actually quite a lot of room for different opinions, and it was natural that many opinions were expressed and met in the Danish media – creating the social debate that is essential for security, peace and democracy. There were debates on security policy around the country – in folk high schools, assembly halls, upper secondary schools and trade unions.

    How I miss that Denmark, which is dead and gone today.

    Back then, no one would dream of excluding/cancelling discussions about peace – nor did anyone suggest that Denmark should contribute to the militarisation of the world or participate in wars abroad – no, Denmark should first and foremost be able to defend itself against an attack or if, God forbid, Article 5 of the NATO Treaty should come into force. Denmark was called a ‘footnote nation;’ the principles were upheld that NATO membership was compatible with the country never accepting nuclear weapons, foreign bases, pre-positioning of equipment, weapons and ammunition on its soil, and that Denmark should not participate in NATO’s nuclear planning group.

    Those were the days. There were politicians who could both read books and write books – readable ones at that.

    And back then, long ago, Politiken was, in my view, the leading newspaper (along with Information, which, however, had less general influence) for common sense, diversity, broad social debate and room for both pro- and anti-military perspectives.

    And peace – and futurology, including global perspectives, Club of Rome reports, which I reviewed, etc.

    OK, things change over 50 years, of course. But Politiken’s current position on foreign and security policy is not a law of nature. Over time, the owners and editorial managers of the daily newspaper could have chosen to preserve at least some of the soul of what Politiken used to be.

    But where does Politiken – which still confidently calls itself ‘the organ of the highest enlightenment since 1884’ – stand today?

    For me, with the above background to compare (there are advantages to getting older…), it stands as one of the highest organs of propaganda about other countries and their – Western-determined – role as threats to the fine, pure, innocent Western world. Whether intentional or not, Politiken legitimises and promotes militarism infinitely more strongly than anti-militarism and peace.

    Today, it can rightly be called PolitPravda.

    My younger readers should know that Pravda was the organ of the Soviet Communist Party; Pravda means ‘the truth’ – and that wasn’t exactly what Pravda contained.

    In the areas of foreign and security policy, today’s Politiken runs on what I call FOSI – Fake+Omission+Source Ignorance. The newspaper’s management clearly sees its role as blindly loyal support for the militarism of the American empire – NATO, interventions, bombings, regime change, hatred of Russia – although not necessarily for Trump’s policies or the grabbing of Greenland.

    FOSI has been and continues to be practised in the coverage of Syria, Israel, Russia, Ukraine… Palestine. And China, which I discuss further down.

    *****

    I have just listened to the fifth episode of Politiken’s populist podcast series: Putin – The World’s Most Dangerous Man? The episode is alternately titled The Grand Plan and How He Is Creating a Generation of Ardent Nationalists. Listen here.

    It is incomprehensibly trivialising, intellectually lazy and unprofessional, with a few facts and guesswork about, for example, Putin’s daily routines, spiced with the journalist’s personal opinions and ‘assessments,’ interrupted now and then by exclusively US-Western media Russophobic expert quotes, which are concocted into breakneck interpretations of the banal central thesis that Putin is power-mad with his Grand Plan for the re-establishment of the old Soviet empire.

    No, dear reader, this is not political satire on Politiken’s humour page, ATS, or elsewhere. These are grown adults conveying this message without any form of analysis or arguments for or against the thesis, based solely on Western mainstream sources. It is blatant Russophobia, entirely in line with the relentless opinion-shaping efforts of the government, the military’ intelligence’ agency, FET, and other media outlets. It is opinion journalism of the worst kind and of no use whatsoever to anyone seeking qualified knowledge.

    There are no theories or concepts, and therefore no rigour. It is tabloid drivel at the lowest level of information and limited in its understanding, in that Russia and Putin are not seen as part of the international system or as a partner in a very complex conflict with the cultural West, which all Soviet/Russian leaders since Gorbaechev, also Putin, has stated clearly that they feel their country belongs to. In this presentation, Russia is an isolated entity – only action and never reaction. It is about a Russia that is only itself and in no way navigates the challenges posed by, for example, NATO. At Politiken, Russia is a pariah that can be talked about – and disparaged – however one pleases.

    This is the result of 110% groupthink, and there is only one possible attitude towards ourselves and towards Russia (and China). From my own experience, I know that it is impossible to get a response from today’s journalists if you point out that their portrayals are, for example, factually incorrect, biased and lacking in basic knowledge and fairness. Or if the top management has chosen a very specific systematic approach to reporting.

    How many times have you seen that this or that country is engaging in dis/misinformation – and that we must protect ourselves against this sedition? We are to understand that it is only the others who do this; we in the West do not engage in such mis/dis behaviour. It is only Russia that threatens us – we cannot in any way be perceived as threatening in the eyes of Russia or China. We have good intentions, but they do not.

    Coincidentally, this awful story about the CIA’s activities in China came out at the same time as Politiken’s series. You will not find that story in Politiken.

    Thus, nothing is too low, simple or stupidly propagandistic. It would be demeaning to children to describe it as ‘sandbox level.’

    This fifth podcast about the world’s most dangerous man is completely uninteresting if you want to know anything about Russia, Putin and international politics – including the invasion/war in Ukraine, which, in NATO agitprop style, is of course and quite foolishly called ‘full-scale,’ which is about the only thing (along with ‘unprovoked’) it cannot be described as. It is simply factual nonsense and should not have made it through quality control. When it does, it is because it is NATO speak, and therefore, there is no professional or ethical problem.

    I wonder how far they can go – and how long it will take – before loyal readers of the highest organ of propaganda realise that they are being deceived? When will the Pravda Moment hit Politiken’s readers?

    And if it is not deliberate deception, then it is simple ignorance and professional incompetence. A third – entirely hypothetical, of course – possibility is that senior editors at Politiken a little too often have lunch with people from the American embassy and say ‘No, thank you’ if they receive invitations from embassies that do not represent NATO and the EU.

    *****

    In keeping with the West’s incredible, rapid intellectual decline and impending fall, coupled with its support for armament and militarism, Politiken has also descended into pure propaganda when it comes to China. In an ‘analysis’ a few days ago, it claimed that China is hunting down critics all over the world. Read it here.

    In another, the theme is that China has infiltrated the UN and distorts and lies about everything related to human rights. Read it here. These are pure smear articles by journalist John Hansen and the newspaper’s Asia correspondent Sebastian Stryhn Kjeldtoft – who is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and not in mainland China.

    China has infiltrated the UN with an army of fake NGOs. Meet the gongos↗

    This is yet another example of how the media sees it as its primary task to write only negatively about China. You hardly ever see anything positive about China and its impressive development over the past 40 years. The classic themes are Tibet, Hong Kong, the ‘genocide’ and ‘concentration camps’ in Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is a dictator – and the system is a dictatorship because it is not a democracy in the Western sense – Chinese researchers, students and agents have stolen everything in the West, China’s military build-up is a threat to the Western world – and then, of course, Taiwan, which, according to Western media, is an independent state (or should be), but is constantly threatened by an invasion launched by Beijing.

    On the other hand, you never hear about what the US and the rest of the West are doing vis-à-vis China – and it is not small stuff and is not done on small budgets. TFF and my staff have mapped out this entire media-based Cold War initiated by the West. Read the full report with extensive, concrete documentation here.

    Both articles are based on material from an organisation that Politiken neither describes nor provides its readers with a link to, namely ‘the journalistic network ICIJ’ – as if readers already knew what ICIJ stands for, much like NATO or the EU. ICIJ’s website can be found here.

    I visited this website on 6 May 2025 and found that of the 13 top articles, 11 are about China – and only about how terrible China is. Several focus on the well-worn story of how China persecutes all Uyghurs. In Politiken, the issue of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang is presented by quoting Zumretay Arkin, vice-president of the World Uyghur Congress, ‘who is fighting for democracy and independence for the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority in the Xinjiang region of western China.’ (My italics).

    However, the whole thing is a little more complicated. A very small minority of Uyghurs want an independent East Turkestan and have been trying to achieve this goal for a couple of decades by carrying out around 1,200 terrorist attacks in and outside Xinjiang. The United States and US-backed terrorist movements support them, and the East Turkestan government-in-exile has been based in Washington for 20 years!

    Many have been arrested and sentenced to prison or re-education camps in China – and it is certainly no fun to be there. But it is also no fun for China that the United States supports violent separatist movements in its largest province – and that some of these Uighur terrorists have been trained by al-Nusra and have been fighting in Syria for years with the aim of returning to Xinjiang and ‘liberating’ it – a province considerably larger than France and with extensive natural resources, through which China’s new Silk Road project, BRI, involving 140 countries runs.

    But in Western media and political propaganda, the terrorist element of this is never mentioned; it is simply that China persecutes Muslims in general and Uighurs in particular. Because remember: this was said by Trump’s then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – a habitual liar and former CIA chief who has himself said that he is proud to have trained CIA agents to ‘lie, cheat and steal.’ On his last day at work, he left a ‘statement’ saying that what was happening in Xinjiang was genocide. Full stop. To date, the State Department has never backed this up with any form of documentation. But TFF has documented how this outright lie has come about, how it is part of the US media’s Cold War against China, and here you can read a report from Xinjiang, which I co-authored.

    People who have no idea what social analysis or journalism is – but have a political agenda – have since promoted the lie, the fake and omission. Whether they know what they are doing or are simply ignorant, I will leave unsaid – but neither is particularly honourable. And the very same media and politicians are simultaneously concealing the actual Israeli/Zionist genocide and ensuring that it is not stopped. The US and its media allies are – once again – at the centre of moral decay.

    Back to the ICIJ website. The ICIJ’s ‘Our team’ consists of 42 journalists; no less than 25 of them are listed as ‘United States,’ and it is indeed in Washington that the organisation has its headquarters. The chairwoman of the board, Rhona Murphy, has worked with a number of leading conservative American media outlets.

    And who finances the ICIJ – which Politiken’s source-uncritical China smear campaign chooses not to reveal to its readers in the two articles? Well, as I thought – yes, I have a nasty mind: A long list of government organisations, foundations and funds in NATO countries, in the West in general – none outside. See the list here.

    Three stand out: the EU, the US State Department and the usual suspect, NED – The National Endowment for Democracy, which is indisputably well known as a front organisation for the CIA. There is hardly a US regime change where NED has not pumped money into NGOs to carry out colour revolutions, etc. The organisation was created by Ronald Reagan, and a former NED director has stated that most people would not want to accept money directly from the CIA and that NED appears less controversial as an NGO.

    As I write this article, Politiken publishes another smear article on 6 May and an editorial by Marcus Rubin – a law graduate, former US correspondent for Politiken and now feature editor and member of the editorial board – with the cultured, journalistically objective headline: “China’s oppression is both lawless and boundless. It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime.”

    A taste:

    It makes for frightening reading about an extremely powerful dictatorial regime whose power is spreading both in Asia and throughout the rest of the world, and which will stop at nothing. The goal of the campaign of repression is to stifle any criticism of the regime in Beijing by persecuting, subjugating and destroying its critics – wherever they may be. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) acknowledges the problems and assesses that China is also ‘attempting to exercise control over Chinese people in Denmark to a large extent.

    Not a single fact, not a single example, not a single piece of evidence. No documentation. It is as if Rubin asked an AI machine to ‘Write some shit about China.’

    The third article in the “highest level of information” about China appeared on 28 April with this sober headline: “Eric compares his former workplace to the Gestapo.” And the introduction reads:

    Chinese people who criticise the Communist Party are hunted down all over the world. Now one of the regime’s former manhunters, the spy “Eric”, tells his story in Politiken. For 15 years, he helped spy on and plan the kidnappings of dissidents, even though he secretly hated the Communists. Now Eric himself has become a victim.

    Like the other articles, the story is accompanied by a tasteful illustration of this type and begins:

    We meet “Eric” at dusk in an anonymous car in a secret location in Australia. He fumbles with the video camera, nervous that some detail in the background might reveal his location. He knows better than most what China’s hackers are capable of. Eric is convinced that his life is in danger. That is why Politiken does not publish his real name…

    So we are simply expected to believe Politiken: that this is objective journalism and not Sinophobic propaganda in the service of the US/the West. China’s intelligence service is like the Gestapo, and so you know that President Xi Jinping is like Hitler. And – surprise, surprise! – it is emphasised that the Chinese embassy has not responded to Politiken’s smear campaign.

    What Politiken naturally never covers is the positive development in China, for the people in general. That, according to the World Bank, 700 million people have been lifted out of poverty in record time. That the country has developed from a poor and dirty underdeveloped country 40 years ago to being the world’s most successful welfare state today, with a super-modern infrastructure, where people have access to education, health, employment, culture – and where incredible resources have been invested in research and development. Unique in the history of humankind.

    Would Politiken kindly publish the figures from the American Edelman Trust Barometer, which show that, year after year, China is the country in the world where the largest proportion of the population has trust in its government. The figure is around 90%; the corresponding figure is 30, some higher and some lower for many in the ‘democratic’ West.

    Would you kindly explain in an editorial how on earth it can be that over 120 million Chinese leave China every year to travel to the rest of the world and 99.999999% return and would not dream of settling permanently anywhere in the Western world. Oh yes, Marcus Rubin, they have all simply been completely brainwashed, haven’t they?

    I wonder if Politiken can find a single Westerner who has travelled around China as a tourist on their own for just 14 days and returned home with the same attitude towards China, the Communist Party and the population as Western racist US/NATO agitprop media continue to have in the current Yellow Peril hysteria, which Politiken also shamelessly and ignorantly promotes with its smear campaigns?

    I am not saying that various media outlets should write hallelujah articles about China. Journalism should never be about conveying a solely positive or solely negative image. It should be about being curious, being fair and conveying facts that are useful for the highest level of public information.

    Politiken simply does not do this. Or it prefers its agitprop role.

    *****

    Politiken’s writers make a big deal out of the fact that China has so-called ‘gongos’ – governmental non-governmental organisations, i.e. government-controlled/influenced NGOs. That is absolutely correct. But it does not occur to them that the ICIJ – and tons of Western NGOs – are wholly or partly funded by their governments and therefore, in practice, also have a restricted mandate and become near-governmental. It does not occur to them – because they have hardly investigated it, as they are uncritical of their sources as long as the message is anti-China (sinophobic) – that they are promoting claims without documentation from the ICIJ, which is partly funded by the US government, including the NED…CIA.

    Even less – one would hope – does it occur to them that they are helping to legitimise armament and increase the risk of actual war between the US/NATO and Russia and/or China. All false threat scenarios have that consequence.

    If Politiken is the organ of the highest information, the lights have gone out on the Danish mass media scene. The articles I have reviewed here are so journalistically poor and so propagandistic that it is far more accurate and relevant to compare Politiken with the old Pravda. (I am only talking about foreign and security policy areas – not about Politiken as a whole).

    Which reminds me that one of the most unique bridge builders between Russia, Ukraine and the United States, Edward Lozensky (1941-2025), has just passed away. Read about him here. Among many other things, he is known for this spot-on description of reality – that of the Western world – which only causes me pain in my heart:

    “The Americans are busy
    turning their country into the Soviet Union.
    And they don’t even realise they’re doing it.”

    This does not only apply to the United States. It applies to the entire Western world. It applies to Denmark. And to PolitPravda.

    The post Danish Politiken Smears China Based on CIA, US, EU and NATO Funded Sources first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On May 9 Russia welcomed twenty-seven heads of state from around the world to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War, which ended in victory over the Nazis, one of the greatest achievements in Russian history, and one that would make any nation justly proud.

    The United States likes to portray the defeat of Nazism as a glorious U.S. achievement, with a nod to British, Canadian, Australian, French and a few others for their supporting roles. This ignores the central fact that the Wehrmacht had been ground nearly to pulp by the time the U.S. invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, an event that 80 years of Hollywood fantasies have attempted to transform into the key battle of the war. In reality, however, this much-delayed opening of a second front in the European war occurred when Hitler’s troops had been reduced to mostly children and old men, the military-aged soldiers having perished in gargantuan numbers on the Eastern front. Tens of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians were also killed there, a large majority deliberately starved by Hitler, who looked to eliminate Slavic peoples and re-populate their territories with a civilized master race of “Aryans.”

    U.S. mind-managers have dispatched this immense Russian agony to Orwell’s memory hole, along with the suffering of the Chinese, who lost about half as much as the USSR on the battlefield (which was still an enormous total) in horrendous camps, and in “scientific” laboratories that treated them like experimental rats. British, French, and American losses, especially civilian deaths, were but a tiny fraction of these.

    The ferocity of the battles fought in Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk defies description and is well beyond the West’s impoverished moral capacity to even begin to apprehend. Three million Nazi soldiers invaded the USSR with the launching of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.  This represented eighty percent of the German Army, almost all of whom were either killed, captured, or wounded over the subsequent three years. Meanwhile, the USSR not only fought the invading Germans, but also ardent Nazi-supporters in Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, along with other European countries that facilitated German military operations and replaced fallen German soldiers in battle.

    Both Churchill and FDR accepted that it was the USSR that defeated the Nazis. Western supplies helped, but it was the heart and determination of the Red Army that brought the Nazi beast down.

    After the war, the Western powers obscured this story with a fanciful tale of being the most heroic human rights champions in history. But it was actually the Red Army that shot anti-Semites while Western myth-makers re-invented the Jew-haters as anti-Communist freedom fighters worthy of admiration.

    Renewing the Cold War it had initiated in 1917 in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, Washington imposed a “cordon-sanitaire” in order to eradicate Communism in Western Europe, a broadly-defined demon class that included major elements of the wartime anti-fascist resistance and trade union movements while those who had accommodated Nazism or gone into hiding faced no such exclusion.

    Today’s inheritors of collaborationist Europe have redoubled their attacks on Russia with economic sanctions and anti-Russian “human rights” tribunals, all in the name of a “never again” anti-genocide crusade that lacks even the slightest pretense of concern for Israel’s ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people.

    Our problems go far beyond Donald Trump.

    Source:

    “Victory Day: Rescuing the Truth,” La Jornada, May 10, 2025 (Spanish)

    The post Russia, the Defeat of Nazism, and the Collaborationist West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The BBC’s role is not to keep viewers informed. It’s to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand

    You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza, as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel, because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.

    But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.

    Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.

    I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue – starving a civilian population – he is charged over.

    Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it – as the British establishment media apparently do – as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”.

    Predictably misleading, too, was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.

    Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March, Israel “blocked humanitarian aid, demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumes military operations.”

    Viewers were left, presumably intentionally, with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.

    None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire, continuing to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.

    Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians – and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about – as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt.

    Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries”. In other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.

    Simply astonishing. We’ve had 19 months of Israeli government ministers and military commanders telling us they are destroying Gaza. They’ve destroyed Gaza. And yet, Western politicians and media still refuse to call it a genocide.

    What is the point of the BBC’s Verify service—supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth—when its team is itself peddling gross distortions of the truth?

    The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.

    The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”

    In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.

    There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of antisemitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.

    If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.

    The post Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • On 2 May Foreign Affairs published an article, “Will China Escalate?: Despite Short-Term Stability, the Risk of Military Crisis Is Rising,” by Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP).

    There are many claims made in the article by Tony Zhao who seemingly looks at China, a 5000-year old Asian civilization, through a western lens (similar to the western-centric analysis made by John Mearsheimer).

    Zhao asserts that Beijing views itself vis-à-vis the United States as in a “strategic stalemate.”

    Comment: What exactly is meant by stalemate? And what statement emerging from Beijing attests to it viewing itself as in a stalemate? The chess metaphor applied to China is a cultural faux pas, as the popular strategizing board game the Chinese play is weiqi (go in English). Draws/stalemates are not a weiqi strategy and are rare.

    Zhao: “Trump’s early second-term actions have strengthened Beijing’s conviction that the United States is accelerating its own decline, bringing a new era of parity ever closer.

    Comment: It is not just Beijing’s conviction. There are plenty of reputable economics/financial experts warning of a US economic decline (see Michael Hudson, Richard Wolff, Yanis Varoufakis, Peter Schiff, Ellen Brown, Sean Foo, Jeffrey Sachs, etc) as well as military experts speaking to a drop off in US military superiority (see Andrei Martyanov, colonel Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter, etc).

    Economic data reveal that the US has been overtaken by China on real GDP/PPP, and economic indicators point to the US potentially heading into recession with a -0.3% growth in Q1 2025, while China’s growth in Q1 2025 was 5.4%.

    Zhao warns that the current stalemate may not last and that over the next four years the “risk of a military crisis will likely rise as the two countries increasingly test each other’s resolve.”

    Comment: It is obvious how the US is testing China’s resolve. But how exactly is it that China is testing the US’ resolve — other than as a defensive response to US machinations? Zhao does not give any examples of this. Vague, unsubstantiated statements should be greeted with extreme skepticism, and such statements speak to a writer’s professionalism and credibility.

    Zhao: “The risk of a U.S.-Chinese military crisis could sharply escalate if Beijing further closes the capability gap with Washington and perceives international indifference to Taiwan’s status, grows frustrated with nonmilitary efforts to unite Taiwan with China, and foresees more pro-Taiwan leadership in Washington and Taipei.

    Comment: The logic behind this sentence is perplexing. Is Zhao suggesting that China should maintain a capability gap so that it is inferior to the US? Furthermore, there is no international indifference to Taiwan’s status. As of June 2024, 183 countries have established diplomatic relations with China under the One China Principle, which acknowledges Taiwan as an inalienable part of China. Depicting China as “frustrated” is contrary to the longstanding stoic image that China usually projects. Xi Jinping is definitively not a fulminating, blustering politician as is commonly found in Washington. As for military efforts to “unite Taiwan with China,” the famous Chinese military strategist Sunzi (Sun Tzu) wrote in The Art of War (Chapter III- “Attack by Stratagem”): “In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”

    Zhao does admit, “Beijing has shown similarly little inclination to initiate near-term military conflict, even over issues of core national interest such as Taiwan.He obviates this by following up with:This restraint, however, has been underwritten by a military buildup, spanning conventional and nuclear forces, that Chinese officials see as critical to shifting the balance of power with the United States.

    Comment: The Chinese military build-up is, arguably, a necessity given the belligerence of the US toward whichever nation does not adhere to its demands. That Taiwan has a form of de facto independence is attributable to the US inserting its 7th Fleet into a Chinese civil war to protect the losing KMT side from the Communist forces (see William Blum, “1. China 1945 to 1960s” in Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II). Moreover, the US has been unfaithful in its adherence to the One China Policy that it effectively ratified in the 1972 Shanghai Communique.

    Zhao: “[China’s] seemingly contradictory surges in economic and diplomatic outreach and its military muscle flexing, evident in high-profile drills near Australia and Japan in February, are, in China’s view, actions characteristic of the great power it believes it has become.

    Comment: There have been no official reports of China conducting military drills near Australia in February 2025. The live-fire drills were held in international waters, 150 nautical miles far beyond Australia’s territorial waters. The Global Times noted the Chinese drills were “fully in accordance with international law and customary practices” and they were “completely different with the Australian military aircraft’s intrusion into China’s airspace” — a serious violation of international law. As for the “high profile drills … near Japan in February,” a web search only revealed China carrying out drills in the Gulf of Tonkin and off Taiwan’s southwest coast. Japanese media noted the drills off Taiwan, none near Japan.

    Zhao: “For its part, the Trump administration is beefing up the United States’ military deterrent against China amid growing concerns about Beijing’s aggressive actions in Asia.

    Comment: This is farcical. How is it that China whose military spending is effectively 52% of US military spending would cause the US to increase its deterrence? (see table below) What are China’s “aggressive actions”? Backwards logic and unsubstantiated allegations.


    Chinese and US military spending compared Source: CEPR, 17 Dec 2024

    Zhao: “Senior Defense Department officials aren’t fully aligned on the importance of Taiwan to U.S. strategy. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, for example, has said that ‘Americans could survive without it’ and is pushing instead to thwart China’s broader regional dominance.

    Comment: What is the importance of Taiwan to the US besides as part of a military containment zone? Does the US’ military encirclement of China convey peaceful intent? Also, what evidence is there that China wants to dominate outside its borders? China rejects hegemony and seeks win-win relationships.

    Zhao writes of “the ratcheting up of tensions sparked by the trade war …

    Comment: Which actor is primarily responsible for ratcheting up tensions? Which actor started the tariffing? This information is important and relevant and needs to be identified and conveyed to the reader

    *****

    It is clear who is the aggressor. China is not ringing the US with military bases. China is not stoking Hawaiian separatist sentiment from the continental US. Are Chinese warships plying US waters?

    Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is a think tank and publisher described as an “influential ruling class organization” whose members come predominantly from the corporate business community which finances the CFR.

    Zhao is listed as a senior fellow at the CEIP, which was ranked as the world’s number one think tank in 2019. Imagine that: such ill-thought-out journalism from a high-ranking think-tank fellow.

    The post Escalating Think Tanks first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Christian fascists and oligarchs gleefully handing Donald Trump his sharpie and executive orders are not making war on the deep state, the radical left or to protect us from “antisemites.” They are making war on verifiable fact, the rule of law and the transparency and accountability that is only possible with a free press, the right to dissent, a vibrant culture and a separation of powers, including an independent judiciary.

    All of these pillars of an open society, as I detail in my book “Death of the Liberal Class,” were degraded long before Trump. The press, including public broadcasting, academia, the Democratic Party, a corporatized and banal culture, a judiciary that serves the billionaire class and a Congress bought by lobbyists, have been disemboweled.

    The post Trumpland appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • It is quite possible to take apart virtually any report in the Guardian on Gaza – as I have done with a story in today’s paper – and identify the same kinds of journalistic malpractice.

    Further, I could have taken any paragraph in the article and parsed it in much the same way as I do below. But for the sake of brevity, I have selected four paragraphs (each in bold) that illustrate the abysmal state of reporting about Gaza by Britain’s supposedly most serious, liberal newspaper.

    Note that these misrepresentations are included in a story that is ostensibly critical of Israel. A new report by the United Nations accuses Israel of physically abusing and torturing its staff, including teachers, doctors, and social workers, and of using others as human shields.

    The language and framing used by the Guardian below serve to dilute the impact of the UN report, and thereby give Israel’s behaviour far more legitimacy than it deserves.

    “The Palestine Red Crescent Society said on Tuesday that Israel had released a medic held since a deadly and hugely controversial attack by Israeli troops on ambulances in southern Gaza on 23 March.”

    “Hugely controversial” is the Guardian’s cowardly way of referring to an indisputable atrocity. Israel murdered 15 paramedics and fire crew members in a three-and-a-half-minute hail of bullets on clearly marked emergency vehicles. Israel then crushed the vehicles, and buried them and the crews’ bodies to hide the evidence.

    In what world is that only “controversial”?

     

    “Controversy” implies two sides to an issue. It suggests room for doubt. There is no debate or doubt about what happened, apart from one perpetuated by the Western media. Had Russia done the same to Ukrainian medics, the Guardian would be calling it what it is: a war crime.

    War crimes aren’t “controversial”. They are war crimes.

    “Israel banned all cooperation with UNRWA’s activities in Gaza and the occupied West Bank earlier this year, and claims the [United Nations] agency has been infiltrated by Hamas, an allegation that has been fiercely contested.”

    Again, “fiercely contested” is the Guardian’s weaselly way of giving credence to an obvious Israeli lie. Israel has had many, many months to produce even a sliver of evidence to support its claim that Hamas infiltrated the UN refugee agency, UNRWA – and they have signally failed to do so.

    To call the smear an “allegation” and claim it is “contested” is to suggest that someone apart from Israel takes the smear seriously. They don’t. That is why it is a smear.

    “Rights groups accuse Israel of using a ‘starvation tactic’ that endangers the whole population, potentially making it a war crime.”

    It is not just “rights groups”, and it’s not just an “accusation”. The International Criminal Court has an arrest warrant out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, and one of those crimes is for starving Gaza’s population. Israel’s starvation policy has actually intensified since Israel broke the ceasefire agreement last month. Israeli leaders even proudly admit they are starving the population. So, how is that just an “accusation”?

    And starving the population isn’t just “potentially” a war crime. It is a war crime. It is a prime example in international law of “collective punishment” – collectively punishing civilians for the actions of their leaders. And in this case, “punishment” is starving them to death – the gravest kind of collective punishment and the gravest kind of war crime.

    “Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to continue the offensive until all the hostages are returned and Hamas is either destroyed or agrees to disarm and leave the territory.”

    Journalists usually use the word “vow” to indicate a positive view of a proposed action. A more neutral word here would be “threatened”. Even the conservative International Court of Justice suspects Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. How does “Netanyahu vowed to continue the genocide until all the hostages are returned” sound? Strange? Outrageous? Then, you understand the point.

    Further, why is the Guardian parroting only the most self-serving of Netanyahu’s claims about the aims of Israel’s war crimes (while giving Israel the benefit of the doubt about whether they are war crimes)? There are a whole host of other, far more plausible reasons for Israel destroying all of Gaza’s infrastructure, including its hospitals, and killing and maiming 100,000s of Palestinians, than “getting the hostages back” or “disarming Hamas”.

    They include an aim stated by Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders that they wish to “encourage” Palestinians to leave their homeland. The wanton death and destruction spread by Israel seem to be what they all mean by “encouragement”.

    The constant drip-drip of skewed language, slanted reporting, and prejudicial framing by the Western media has a purpose. It is intended to erode the reader’s sense of right and wrong, fact and fiction, victim and oppressor.

    It is there to disorientate us, leaving us more open to disbelieving what we can see with our own eyes: that there is a genocide going on, and our own leaders are actively assisting it.

    The post The Drip-drip of Slanted Gaza Reporting Erodes Our Sense of Right and Wrong first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How odd to look back now — now, as Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine ends in ignominious defeat—and think of that cornucopia of propaganda spilling out of what I called during the early months Washington’s “bubble of pretend.” Take a few minutes to remember with me.

    There was the “Ghost of Kyiv,” an heroic MiG–29 pilot credited with downing six, count ’em, six Russian fighters in a single night, Feb. 24, 2022, two days after the Russian intervention began. The Ghost turned out to be a fantasy confected out of a popular video game.

    So crude, the early Ukrainian propaganda, so rank.

    The post Losing And Learning Nothing appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Reporters Without Borders

    Donald Trump campaigned for the White House by unleashing a nearly endless barrage of insults against journalists and news outlets.

    He repeatedly threatened to weaponise the federal government against media professionals whom he considers his enemies.

    In his first 100 days in office, President Trump has already shown that he was not bluffing.

    “The day-to-day chaos of the American political news cycle can make it hard to fully take stock of the seismic shifts that are happening,” said Clayton Weimers, executive director of RSF North America.

    “But when you step back and look at the whole picture, the pattern of blows to press freedom is quite clear.

    “RSF refuses to accept this massive attack on press freedom as the new normal. We will continue to call out these assaults against the press and use every means at our disposal to fight back against them.

    “We urge every American who values press freedom to do the same.”

    Here is the Trump administration’s war on the press by the numbers: *

    • 427 million Weekly worldwide audience of the USAGM news outlets silenced by Trump

    In an effort to eliminate the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) by cutting grants to outlets funded by the federal agency and placing their reporters on leave, the government has left millions around the world without vital sources of reliable information.

    This leaves room for authoritarian regimes, like Russia and China, to spread their propaganda unchecked.

    However, RSF recently secured an interim injunction against the administration’s dismantling of the USAGM-funded broadcaster Voice of America,which also reinstates funding to the outlets  Radio Free Asia (RFA) and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN).

    • 8,000+ US government web pages taken down

    Webpages from more than a dozen government sites were removed almost immediately after President Trump took office, leaving journalists and the public without critical information on health, crime, and more.

    • 3,500+Journalists and media workers at risk of losing their jobs thanks to Trump’s shutdown of the USAGM

    Journalists from VOA, the MBN, RFA, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are at risk of losing their jobs as the Trump administration works to shut down the USAGM. Furthermore, at least 84 USAGM journalists based in the US on work visas now face deportation to countries where they risk prosecution and severe harassment.

    At least 15 journalists from RFA and eight from VOA originate from repressive states and are at serious risk of being arrested and potentially imprisoned if deported.

    • 180Public radio stations at risk of closing if public media funding is eliminated

    The Trump administration reportedly plans to ask Congress to cut $1.1 billion in allocated funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). These cuts will hit rural communities and stations in smaller media markets the hardest, where federal funding is most impactful.

    • 74 – Days the Associated Press (AP) has been banned from the White House

    On February 11, the White House began barring the Associated Press (AP) news agency from its events because of the news agency’s continued use of the term “Gulf of Mexico,” which President Trump prefers to call the “Gulf of America” — a blatant example of retaliation against the media.

    Despite a federal judge ruling the administration must reinstate the news agency’s access on April 9, the White House has continued to limit AP’s access.

    • 64 Disparaging comments made by Trump against the media on Truth Social since inauguration

    In addition to regular, personal attacks against the media in press conferences and public speeches, Trump takes to his social media site nearly every day to insult, threaten, or intimidate journalists and media workers who report about him or his administration critically.

    • 13 Individuals pardoned by President Trump after being convicted or charged for attacking journalists on January 6, 2021

    Trump pardoned over a dozen individuals charged with or convicted of violent crimes against journalists at the US Capitol during the January 6 insurrection.

    •  Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiries into media companies

    Brendan Carr, co-author of the Project 2025 playbook and chair of the FCC, has wasted no time launching politically motivated investigations, explicit threats against media organisations, and implicit threats against their parent companies. These include inquiries into CBS, ABC parent company Disney, NBC parent company Comcast, public broadcasters NPR and PBS, and California television station KCBS.

    • 4Trump’s personal lawsuits against media organisations

    While Trump settled a lawsuit with ABC’s parent company Disney, he continues to sue CBS, The Des Moines Register, Gannett, and the Pulitzer Center over coverage he deemed biased.

    • $1.60Average annual amount each American pays for public media

    Donald Trump has threatened to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, framing the move as a cost-cutting measure.

    However, public media only costs each American about $1.60 each year, representing a tremendous bargain as it gives Americans access to a wealth of local, national, and lifesaving emergency programming.

    • The United States was 55th out of 180 nations listed by the RSF World Press Freedom Index in 2024. The new index rankings will be released this week.

    * Figures as of the date of publication, 24 April 2025. Pacific Media Watch collaborates with RSF.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • This video dives into a groundbreaking investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, exposing how fabricated stories about October 7 were used to justify mass violence — and how the Western media played along.

    The post How Israel Used October 7 to Spread Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Al Jazeera.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • COMMENTARY: By Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab

    “Wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.” These were the words from New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner Stephen Rainbow.

    During a meeting with Philippa Yasbek from Jewish Voices for Peace, Dr Rainbow allegedly told her that information from the NZ Security Intelligence Services (NZSIS) threat assessment asserted that Muslims were the biggest threat to the Jewish community. More so than white supremacists.

    But the NZSIS has not identified Muslims as the greatest threat to national security.

    In the 2023 threat environment report, NZSIS stated that it: “Does not single out any community as a threat to our country, and to do so would be a misinterpretation of the analysis.

    “White Identity-Motivated Violent Extremism (W-IMVE) continues to be the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Young people becoming involved in W-IMVE is a growing trend.”

    Religiously motivated violent extremism (RMVE) did not come from the Muslim community, as Dr Rainbow has also misrepresented.

    The more recent 2024 NZSIS report stated: “White identity-motivated violent extremism (W-IMVE) remains the dominant IMVE ideology in New Zealand. Terrorist attack-related material and propaganda, including the Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto and livestream footage, continue to be shared among IMVE adherents in New Zealand and abroad.”

    To implicate Muslims as being the greatest threat may highlight Dr Rainbow’s own biases, racist beliefs, and political agenda. These false narratives, that have recently been strongly pushed by the US and Israel, undermine social cohesion and lead to a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.

    It is also deeply troubling that he has framed Muslim and Arab communities as potential sources of violent extremism while failing to acknowledge the very real and documented threats they have faced in Aotearoa.

    The Christchurch Mosque attacks — the most horrific act of mass violence in New Zealand’s modern history — were perpetrated not by Muslims, but against them, by an individual radicalised by white supremacist ideology.

    Chief Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow
    Chief Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow . . . “It is also deeply troubling that he has framed Muslim and Arab communities as potential sources of violent extremism while failing to acknowledge the very real and documented threats they have faced in Aotearoa.” Image: HRC

    Since that tragedy, there have been multiple threats made against mosques, Arab New Zealanders, and Palestinian communities, many of which have received insufficient public attention or institutional response.

    For a Human Rights Commissioner to overlook this context and effectively invert the victim-aggressor dynamic is not only factually inaccurate, but it also risks reinforcing harmful stereotypes and undermining the safety and dignity of communities who are already vulnerable.

    Such narratives are inconsistent with the Human Rights Commission’s mandate to protect all people in New Zealand from discrimination and hate.

    The dehumanisation of Muslims and Palestinians
    As part of Israel’s propaganda, anti-Muslim and Palestinian tropes are used to justify violence against Palestinians by framing us as barbaric, aggressive, and as a threat. We are dehumanised in order to normalise the harm they inflict on our communities which includes genocide, land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid policies, dispossession, and occupation.

    In October 2023, Dan Gillerman, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, described Palestinians as “horrible, inhuman animals” and was perplexed with the growing global concern for us.

    That same month Yoav Gallant, then Israeli Defence Minister, referred to Palestinians as “human animals” when he announced Israel’s illegal and horrific siege on Gaza that included blocking water, food, medicine, and shelter to an entire population, the majority of which are children.

    In making his own remarks about the Muslim community being a “threat” in New Zealand as a collective group, and labelling Palestinians being “barbaric”, Dr Stephen Rainbow has shattered the credibility of the Human Rights Commission. He has made it very clear that he is not impartial nor is he representing and protecting all communities.

    Instead, Dr Rainbow is exacerbating divisions within society. This is a worrying trend that we are witnessing around the world; the de-humanising of groups to serve political agendas, retain power, or seek public support for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    Dr Rainbow’s appointment also points a spotlight onto this government’s commitment to neutrality and inclusiveness in its human rights policies. Allowing a high-ranking official to make discriminatory remarks undermines New Zealand’s commitment to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    A high-ranking official should not be allowed to engage in Islamic and Palestinian racist rhetoric without consequence. The public should be questioning the morals, principles, and inclusivity of those currently in power. Our trust is being eroded.

    Dr Stephen Rainbow’s comments can also be seen as a breach of human rights principles, as he is supposed to uphold equality and non-discrimination. Yet his beliefs seem to be peppered with racism, often falsely based on religion, ethnicity, and race.

    Foreign influence in New Zealand
    This incident also shines accountability and concerns for foreign influence and propaganda seeping into New Zealand. The Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ) has published articles that some perceive as dehumanising toward Palestinians.

    In one article written by Dr Rainbow titled “With every chant Israel’s case grows stronger”, he says:

    “The Left has found a new underdog to replace the Jews — the Palestinians — in spite of the fact that the treatment of gay people, women, and political opponents wherever Palestinians have control is barbaric.”

    By publicising these comments, The Israel Institute of New Zealand signalled its support of these offensive and racist serotypes. Such statements risk reinforcing a narrative that portrays Palestinians as inherently violent, uncivilised, and unworthy of basic rights and dignity.

    This kind of rhetoric contributes to what many describe as anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism, and it warrants public scrutiny, especially when shared by organisations involved in shaping public discourse.

    Importantly, the NZSIS 2024 threat report stated that “Inflammatory and violent language online can target anyone, although most appears directed towards those from already marginalised minority communities, or those affected by globally significant conflicts or events, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict.”

    Other statements and reposts published online by the IINZ on their X account include:

    “Muslims are getting killed, is Israel involved? No. How many casualties? Under 100,00, who cares? Why is this even on the news? Over 100,000. Oh, that’s too bad, what’s for dinner?” (12 February 2024)

    “Fact. Gaza isn’t ‘ancestral Palestinian land’. We’ve been here long before them, and we’ll still be here long after the latest propaganda campaign.” (12 February 2024)

    Palestinian society was also described as being “a violent, terror-supporting, Jew-hating society with genocidal aspirations.” (16 February 2025)

    The “estimate of Hamas casualties, the civilian-to-combat death ratio could be as low as 1:1. This could be historically low for urban warfare.” (21 February 2025)

    “There has never been a country called Palestine.” (25 February 2025)

    Even showing a picture of Gaza before Israel’s bombing campaign with a caption saying, “Open air prison”. Next to it a picture of a completely destroyed Gaza with a caption that says “Victory.” (23 February 2025)

    “Palestinian society in Gaza is in my eyes little more than a death loving cult of murderers and criminals of the lowest kind.” (28 February 2025)

    Anti-Palestinian bias and racism
    Portraying Muslims and Palestinians as a threat and extremist reflects both Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian bias and potential racism. These statements risk dehumanising Palestinians and are typical of the settler colonial narrative used to erase indigenous populations by denying our history, identity and legal claim.

    The IINZ has published content that many see as mocking the deaths of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which is not only ethically questionable but can be seen as a complete lack of empathy.

    And posting the horrific images of a completely destroyed Gaza, appears to revel in the suffering of others and contradicts basic ethical norms, such as decency and compassion.

    There also appears to be a common theme among pro-Israeli organisations, not just the IINZ, that cast negative connotations on our national symbols including our Palestinian flag and keffiyeh.

    In an article on the IINZ webpage, titled “A justified war”, they write “chorus of protesters wearing keffiyehs, waving their Palestinian and terrorist flags, and shouting about Israel’s alleged war crimes.”

    It seemingly places the Palestinian flag — an internationally recognised national symbol– alongside so-called “terrorist flags,” suggesting an equivalence between Palestinian identity and terrorism. Many view this language as dehumanising and inflammatory, erasing the legitimate national and cultural characteristics of Palestinians and feeding into harmful stereotypes.

    The Palestinian flag represents a people, their identity, and national aspirations.

    There is nothing wrong with our keffiyeh, it is part of our national dress. The negative connotations of Palestinian cultural symbols have to stop, including vilifying other MPs or supporters who wear it in solidarity.

    This is happening all too often in New Zealand and must be called out and addressed. Our keffiyeh is not just a scarf — it is a symbol of our Palestinian identity, our resistance, and our rich, historic and deeply rooted cultural heritage.

    Pro-Israeli groups attack it because they aim to delegitimise Palestinian identity and resistance by associating it with violence, terrorism, or extremism.

    In 2024, ISESCO and UNESCO both recognised the keffiyeh as an essential part of their Intangible Cultural Heritage lists as a way of safeguarding Palestinian cultural heritage and reinforcing its historical and symbolic importance.

    As a safeguarded cultural artifact, much like indigenous dress and other traditional attire, attempts to ban or demonize it are acts of cultural erasure and need to be called out as such and dealt with accordingly.

    In the same IINZ article titled “A Justified War”, the authors present arguments that appear to defend Israel’s military actions in Gaza, including the targeting of civilians.

    Many within the community (most of us have been affected), including survivors and those with direct ties to the region, have found the article deeply distressing and feel that it lacks compassion for the victims of the ongoing violence, and the framing and tone of the piece have raised serious ethical concerns, especially as some statements are factually incorrect.

    The New Zealand Palestinian communities affected by this unimaginable genocide are suffering. Our family members are being killed and are at threat daily from Israel’s aggression and illegal war.

    Unfortunately, much rhetoric from this organisation aligns with Israeli state narratives and includes statements that some view as racist or immoral, warranting further scrutiny from the government.

    There is growing public concern over the association of Human Rights Commissioner Dr Stephen Rainbow with the IINZ, which promotes itself as a research and advocacy body.

    A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination; aligning with Israel and publishing harmful rhetoric may lead to bias in policy decisions and discrimination.

    It is also important to remember that we are not a monolithic group. Christian Palestinians exist (I am one) as well as Muslim and historically Jewish Palestinians. Christian communities have lived in Palestine for two thousand years.

    This is also not a religious conflict, as many pro-Israeli groups wish the world to believe, and it is not complex. It is one of colonialism, dispossession, and human rights. A history that New Zealand is all too familiar with.

    "A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination"
    “A Human Rights Commissioner requires neutrality and a commitment to protecting all communities from discrimination; aligning with Israel and publishing harmful rhetoric may lead to bias in policy decisions and discrimination.” Image: HRC screenshot APR

    The need for accountability
    Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith’s inaction and disrespectful response, claiming that a staunchly pro-Israeli supporter can be impartial and will be “very careful” from now on, hints that he may also support some forms of racism, in this case against Muslims and Palestinians.

    Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith
    Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith . . . “There needs to be accountability for Goldsmith. Why has he not removed Dr Rainbow from office and acted appropriately?” Image: NZ Parliament

    You cannot address only some groups who are discriminated against but then ignore others, or accept excuses for racist, intolerable actions or statements. This is not justice.

    This is the application of selective principles, enforced and underpinned by political agendas, foreign influence, and racism. Does Goldsmith understand that justice is as much about human rights, fairness and accountability as it is about laws?

    Without accountability, there is no justice at all, or perhaps he too is confused or uncertain about his role, as much as Dr Rainbow seems oblivious to his?

    There needs to be accountability for Goldsmith. Why has he not removed Dr Rainbow from office and acted appropriately? If Dr Rainbow had said that Jews were the biggest threat to Muslims or that Israelis were the biggest threat to Palestinians, would this government and Goldsmith have sat back and said, “he didn’t mean it, it was a mistake, and he has apologised”?

    Questions New Zealanders should be asking are, what kind of Human Rights Commissioner speaks of entire peoples this way? What kind of minister, like Paul Goldsmith, looks at that and does very little?

    What kind of Government claims to champion justice, while turning a blind eye to genocide? This is betraying the very idea of human rights itself.

    Although we are a small country here in New Zealand, we have remained strong by upholding and standing by our principles. We said no to apartheid in South Africa. We said no to nuclear weapons in the Pacific. We said no to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    And we must now say no to dehumanisation — anywhere. Are we a nation that upholds justice or do we sit on the sidelines while the darkest times in modern history envelopes us all?

    The attacks against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims must stop. We have already faced horrific acts of violence against us here in New Zealand and currently in Palestine. We need support and humanity, not dehumanisation, demonisation and cruelty. This is not what New Zealand is about, we must do better together.

    There needs to be a formal enquiry and policy review to see if structural biases exist in New Zealand’s Human Rights institutions. This should also be done across some government bodies, including the Ministry of Education and Immigration NZ, to determine if there has been discrimination or inequality in the handling of humanitarian visas and how the Education Ministry has handled the complaints of anti-Palestinian discrimination at schools.

    Communities have particular concern at how the curriculum in many schools deals with the creation of the state of Israel but is silent on Palestinian history.

    Public figures should be held to a higher standard, with consequences for spreading racially charged rhetoric.

    The Human Rights Commission needs to rebuild trust in our multicultural New Zealand society. The only way this can be done is through fair and just measures that include enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, true inclusivity and action when there is an absence of these.

    We are living in a moment where silence is complicity. Where apathy is betrayal.

    This is a test of whether New Zealand, Minister Goldsmith and this government truly uphold human rights for all, or only for some.

    Katrina Mitchell-Kouttab is a New Zealand Palestinian advocate and writer.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology.

    History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold.

    The post Restoring Lies And Insanity To American History appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

    This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

    Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

    See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

    And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

    Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

    This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

    This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

    But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox. Operation chaos.

    The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

    There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

    Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

    ‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

    It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

    The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

    It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

    Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

    Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis,Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

    The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

    While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

    While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris’s focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

    Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

    On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged from the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

    MKULTRA

    MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

    The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields. [my emphasis]

    In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

    MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

    Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

    While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

    This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

    Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

    Frank Olson

    I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

    I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

    Conclusion

    Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

    With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

    The post Do You Think You’ll Ever Know, Now That You Have Handed Your Mind to the Machine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ANALYSIS: By Valerie A. Cooper, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

    Of all the contradictions and ironies of Donald Trump’s second presidency so far, perhaps the most surprising has been his shutting down the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for being “radical propaganda”.

    Critics have long accused the agency — and its affiliated outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — of being a propaganda arm of US foreign policy.

    But to the current president, the USAGM has become a promoter of “anti-American ideas” and agendas — including allegedly suppressing stories critical of Iran, sympathetically covering the issue of “white privilege” and bowing to pressure from China.

    Propaganda is clearly in the eye of the beholder. The Moscow Times reported Russian officials were elated by the demise of the “purely propagandistic” outlets, while China’s Global Times celebrated the closure of a “lie factory”.

    Meanwhile, the European Commission hailed USAGM outlets as a “beacon of truth, democracy and hope”. All of which might have left the average person understandably confused: Voice of America? Wasn’t that the US propaganda outlet from World War II?

    Well, yes. But the reality of USAGM and similar state-sponsored global media outlets is more complex — as are the implications of the US agency’s demise.

    Public service or state propaganda?
    The USAGM is one of several international public service media outlets based in Western democracies. Others include Australia’s ABC International, the BBC World Service, CBC/Radio-Canada, France Médias Monde, NHK-World Japan, Deutsche Welle in Germany and SRG SSR in Switzerland.

    Part of the Public Media Alliance, they are similar to national public service media, largely funded by taxpayers to uphold democratic ideals of universal access to news and information.

    Unlike national public media, however, they might not be consumed — or even known — by domestic audiences. Rather, they typically provide news to countries without reliable independent media due to censorship or state-run media monopolies.

    The USAGM, for example, provides news in 63 languages to more than 100 countries. It has been credited with bringing attention to issues such as protests against covid-19 lockdowns in China and women’s struggles for equal rights in Iran.

    On the other hand, the independence of USAGM outlets has been questioned often, particularly as they are required to share government-mandated editorials.

    Voice of America has been criticised for its focus on perceived ideological adversaries such as Russia and Iran. And my own research has found it perpetuates stereotypes and the neglect of African nations in its news coverage.

    Leaving a void
    Ultimately, these global media outlets wouldn’t exist if there weren’t benefits for the governments that fund them. Sharing stories and perspectives that support or promote certain values and policies is an effective form of “public diplomacy”.

    Yet these international media outlets differ from state-controlled media models because of editorial systems that protect them from government interference.

    The Voice of America’s “firewall”, for instance, “prohibits interference by any US government official in the objective, independent reporting of news”. Such protections allow journalists to report on their own governments more objectively.

    In contrast, outlets such as China Media Group (CMG), RT from Russia, and PressTV from Iran also reach a global audience in a range of languages. But they do this through direct government involvement.

    CMG subsidiary CCTV+, for example, states it is “committed to telling China’s story to the rest of the world”.

    Though RT states it is an autonomous media outlet, research has found the Russian government oversees hiring editors, imposing narrative angles, and rejecting stories.

    Staff member with sign protesting in front of Voice of America sign.
    A Voice of America staffer protests outside the Washington DC offices on March 17, 2025, after employees were placed on administrative leave. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

    Other voices get louder
    The biggest concern for Western democracies is that these other state-run media outlets will fill the void the USAGM leaves behind — including in the Pacific.

    Russia, China and Iran are increasing funding for their state-run news outlets, with China having spent more than US$6.6 billion over 13 years on its global media outlets. China Media Group is already one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, providing news content to more than 130 countries in 44 languages.

    And China has already filled media gaps left by Western democracies: after the ABC stopped broadcasting Radio Australia in the Pacific, China Radio International took over its frequencies.

    Worryingly, the differences between outlets such as Voice of America and more overtly state-run outlets aren’t immediately clear to audiences, as government ownership isn’t advertised.

    An Australian senator even had to apologise recently after speaking with PressTV, saying she didn’t know the news outlet was affiliated with the Iranian government, or that it had been sanctioned in Australia.

    Switched off
    Trump’s move to dismantle the USAGM doesn’t come as a complete surprise, however. As the authors of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America described, the first Trump administration failed in its attempts to remove the firewall and install loyalists.

    This perhaps explains why Trump has resorted to more drastic measures this time. And, as with many of the current administration’s legally dubious actions, there has been resistance.

    The American Foreign Service Association says it will challenge the dismantling of the USAGM, while the Czech Republic is seeking EU support to keep Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty on the air.

    But for many of the agency’s journalists, contractors, broadcasting partners and audiences, it may be too late. Last week, The New York Times reported some Voice of America broadcasts had already been replaced by music.The Conversation

    Dr Valerie A. Cooper is lecturer in media and communication, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington.  This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • During his first term, President Donald Trump exerted a “maximum pressure” campaign against perceived U.S. adversaries in Latin America and elsewhere. Among other hardline policies, he levelled crippling sanctions against Venezuela—leading, ironically, to a mass exodus of Venezuelans to the United States—and reversed former President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba. But just how committed is Trump to fighting communism in Latin America at this particular moment—in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua? Today, it’s anyone’s guess.

    Trump’s recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland, on top of his clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, take the spotlight off the “real enemies,” as usually defined by Washington. In that sense, Trump’s foreign policy actions in the first two months of his second administration are a far cry from his first, when regime change was the unmistakable goal.

    In sharp contrast to the rhetoric of his first administration, in his March 4 address to the Joint Session of Congress Trump made no reference to Nicolás Maduro, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or Daniel Ortega. It’s even unclear whether Trump will pursue the use of international sanctions, which he ratcheted up against Venezuela and Cuba in his first government. So far, Trump has indicated that his use of “tariffs as punishment” may be preferable to international sanctions, which, as one insider stated, the president “worries are causing countries to move away from the U.S. dollar.”

    Unlike Trump’s policies on immigration, trans rights, and taxation, his Latin American policy is plagued by vacillations and uncertainties, a sign of his deepening reliance on a transactional approach to foreign policy. The anti-communist hardliners in and outside of the Republican party are not pleased.

    The Venezuelan Pendulum

    Take Venezuela as an example. The Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado had all the reason to be upbeat when Trump won in November and then chose Latin America hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.

    “Sadly, Venezuela is governed by a narco-trafficking organization,” Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing, in which his appointment was unanimously ratified. He then said that “the Biden administration got played” when it negotiated with Maduro in late- 2022 and issued a license to Chevron, which is “providing billions of dollars into the regimes’ coffers.” With regard to Cuba, Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”

    Events in Syria added to the euphoria on the right. Just days before Trump’s inauguration, Machado told the Financial Times, “Don’t you think [the generals supporting Maduro] look in the mirror and see the generals which Assad left behind?”

    But then came the friendly encounter between Trump’s envoy for special missions Richard Grenell and Maduro in Caracas in late January, when Maduro agreed to turn over six U.S. prisoners in Venezuela and facilitate the return of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States. Days later, the Biden-approved license with Chevron for exploiting Venezuelan oil, constituting a quarter of the nation’s total oil production, was allowed to roll over. At the same time, Grenell declared that Trump “does not want to make changes to the [Maduro] regime.”

    To complicate matters further, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would cancel Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status for over 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, on grounds that “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime that allow for these nationals to be safely returned to their home country.”

    These developments did not sit well with the Miami hawks and the Venezuelan opposition. Notorious Miami Herald journalist Andres Oppenheimer put it forcefully: “The handshake of Grenell and Maduro fell like a bucket of cold water on many sectors of the Venezuelan opposition… and was like a legitimation of the Maduro government.” Oppenheimer went on to point out that although the Trump government denied it had cut a deal with Maduro, “many suspicions have been raised and will not dissipate until Trump clarifies the matter.”

    After Grenell’s trip to Venezuela, the issue of the renewal of Chevron’s license took surprising twists and turns. In a video conversation on February 26, Donald Trump Jr. told María Corina Machado that just an hour before, his father had tweeted that Chevron’s license would be discontinued. Following a burst of laughter, a delighted Machado directed remarks at Trump Sr.: “Look, Mr. President, Venezuela is the biggest opportunity in this continent, for you, for the American people, and for all the people in our continent.” Machado appeared to be attempting to replicate the deal between Zelensky and Trump involving Ukraine’s mineral resources.

    But simultaneously, Mauricio Claver-Carone, the State’s Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America, told Oppenheimer that the license granted Chevron was “permanent” and automatically renewed every six months. Then, just one week later, Trump reversed his position again. Axios reported that the latest decision was due to pressure from three Florida GOP House members who threatened to withhold votes for Trump’s budget deal. Trump allegedly acknowledged this privately, telling insiders: “They’re going crazy and I need their votes.”

    Trumpism’s Internal Strains

    Trump’s threats against world leaders come straight out of his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. For some loyalists, the strategy is working like magic. Trump’s approach can be summarized as “attack and negotiate.” “My style of deal-making is quite simple,” he states in the book. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing… to get what I’m after.”

    This is precisely what happened when Trump announced plans to “reclaim” the Panama Canal, prompting a Hong Kong-based firm to reveal plans to sell the operation of two Panamanian ports to a consortium that includes BlackRock. Not surprisingly, Trump took credit for the deal.

    A similar scenario played out in the case of Colombia, in which President Gustavo Petro yielded on U.S. deportation flights to avert trade retaliations. For the same reasons, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum began sending 10,000 troops to the northern border to combat irregular crossings and then, on March 6, asked Trump by phone: “’How can we continue to collaborate if the U.S. is doing something that hurts the Mexican people?” In response, Trump temporarily suspended the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods.

    In The Art of the Deal, Trump boasts about this strategy of bluffing, such as when he told the New Jersey Licensing Commission that he was “more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time-consuming.” Similarly, Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States does not need Venezuelan oil. In fact, global oil volatility and the possibility that other nations will gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves are matters of great concern to Washington.

    The “Art of the Deal” approach to foreign policy exemplifies Trump’s pragmatic tendency. The Maduro government and some on the left welcome the pragmatism because it leaves open the possibility of concessions by Venezuela in return for the lifting of sanctions. Venezuelan government spokespeople, at least publicly, give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attributing his annulment of Chevron’s license and other adverse decisions to pressure from Miami’s far right. The Wall Street Journal reported that several U.S. businesspeople who traveled to Caracas and “met with Maduro and his inner circle say the Venezuelans were convinced that Trump would… engage with Maduro much like he had with the leaders of North Korea and Russia.”

    But this optimism overlooks the contrasting currents within Trumpism. Although the convergences are currently greater than the differences, priorities within the MAGA movement sometimes clash. On the one hand, right-wing populism spotlights the issue of immigration, anti-“wokism,” and opposition to foreign aid, all designed to appeal beyond the Republican Party’s traditional upper and upper-middle class base of support. On the other hand, the conventional far right calls for nothing short of regime change and destabilization actions against Venezuela and Cuba. While progressives have sharply different views on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the far-right hawks currently define all three governments as “leftist” and, in the recent words of Rubio, “enemies of humanity.”

    Maduro’s agreement to collaborate on the repatriation of immigrants in return for the renewal of the Chevron license exemplifies the conflicting priorities within Trumpism. For the anti-left far right, the alleged deal was a “betrayal” of principles by Washington, while for the right-wing populists it was a victory for Trump, especially given the enormity of Venezuela’s immigrant population.

    Another example of clashing priorities upheld by the two currents is the Trump administration’s decision to cut foreign aid programs to a bare minimum. In his recent address to Congress, Trump denounced an $8 million allotment to an LGBTQ+ program in an African nation “nobody has heard of,” and other alleged woke programs. Even Florida’s hawk senator Rick Scott has questioned the effectiveness of foreign aid, saying: “Let’s see: the Castro regime still controls Cuba, Venezuela just stole another election, Ortega is getting stronger in Nicaragua.” Scott’s statement reflects Trump’s transactional thinking regarding the Venezuelan opposition: too many dollars for regime-change attempts that turned out to be fiascos.

    In contrast, hawk champion Oppenheimer published an opinion piece in the Miami Herald titled “Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts are a Boon for Dictators in China, Venezuela and Cuba.”

    The issue of U.S. aid has also produced infighting from an unexpected source: within the Venezuelan right-wing opposition. Miami-based investigative journalist Patricia Poleo, a long-time opponent of Hugo Chávez and Maduro, has accused Juan Guaidó and his interim government of pocketing millions, if not billions, granted them by the U.S. government. Poleo, now a U.S. citizen, claims that the FBI is investigating Guaidó for mishandling the money.

    The influence of the anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated. Trump has become the leading inspiration of what has been called the new “Reactionary International,” which is committed to combatting the Left around the world. Furthermore, the hawks who have expressed interest in toppling the Maduro government (which the populist current is not at all opposed to either)—including Rubio, Elon Musk, Claver-Carone, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz—populate Trump’s circle of advisors.

    It is not surprising that during the honeymoon phase of Trump’s presidency, a populist wish list would receive considerable attention. But the annexation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland is unrealizable, as is the conversion of Gaza into a Riviera of the Middle East. His tariff scheme is not far behind. Furthermore, while his use of intimidation has helped him gain concessions, the effectiveness of this bargaining tactic is limited—threats lose power when endlessly repeated. Finally, Trump’s unfulfilled promises to lower food prices and achieve other economic feats will inevitably add to the disillusionment of his supporters.

    Trump loathes losing and, in the face of declining popularity, he is likely to turn to more realistic goals that can count on bipartisan support in addition to endorsement from the commercial media. In this scenario, the three governments in the hemisphere perceived to be U.S. adversaries are likely targets. Short of U.S. boots on the ground—which would not garner popular support—military or non-military action cannot be discarded against Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua, or, perhaps, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

    The post Trump’s Policy toward Latin America first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Recently, a friend asked me: if I could be a henchwoman for any villain in movies, TV, or any media, who would I choose? I chose the DC comic book villain Lex Luthor. Working for his business, LexCorp, would just be a 9-to-5 job with a 401(k) and a dental plan, with the bonus of never having to fight Superman or any other hero. Why would they bother fighting a low-level office worker?

    In comic books, wealth is a superpower. The ability to make henchmen do their bidding is the only way most villains can stand up to heroes, and it allows heroes to focus on what they want to do. Batman, for instance, can maintain his lifestyle because of the people working for Wayne Enterprises. Even in fiction, an individual’s relationship to production dictates the manner of life they live. Superheroes and villains can perform super-powered acts of labor, or they have access to other people’s labor.

    When I was younger, my favorite comic book was Green Lantern. Each Green Lantern gets their power from a ring given to them by space aliens called the Guardians of the Universe. These ancient beings have the ability to distribute superpowers like candy, using the recipients of their rings to form a galactic police force that suppresses their enemies and assists their allies. The Guardians’ control over the production of these rings gives them incredible power, even by comic book standards.

    Strength alone isn’t what wins a fight in comics. The good guys usually succeed, and the bad guys typically lose in the end, but not before causing harm to raise the stakes for the hero. A villain who can’t beat the hero can still make that hero choose between saving the city and saving their love interest. A female love interest is often just a prop to move the story along; she has no real agency.

    The term “fridging” describes a trope in fiction where women are harmed to motivate male protagonists. “Fridging” was coined after a 1999 issue of Green Lantern where the Lantern’s girlfriend was killed and stuffed into a refrigerator. Society conditions us to its worldview, and if we don’t think critically about what we consume, it leaves an impression on us. Feminism can help us understand media and power structures, but it takes multiple lenses to build a complete worldview.

    I love questions like, “Who would you hench for?” It gives us a chance to think about media in a new way. Before learning dialectical materialism, I would have said I’d hench for the Guardians of the Universe and become a Green Lantern—mostly to start a conversation about how the Guardians are the real bad guys. Now, I’d rather answer honestly: if my boss told me to fight Batman, I’d quit.

    Of course, I wouldn’t cut it as a real henchwoman; they wouldn’t even hire me. Why would an employer hire someone who won’t do what they want? Why would DC Comics hire a writer who writes about changing the status quo? In capitalist media, people who want to change the status quo are portrayed as the bad guys, while those who restore and protect it are good.

    The more people see a piece of media, the greater the impression it leaves on society. DC Comics and every other major media producer know they have power over society that the average worker does not. They don’t want to give up that power, so their stories will always be biased in their favor. The rich heroes like Batman are good because they sustain the society they interact with. The villains like Lex Luthor are bad because they are trying to change things. Luthor’s changes might be harmful, but systemic change of any kind is almost always depicted negatively.

    Movies, books, music—whatever form of media we consume—shapes who we are. “Who would you hench for?” doesn’t just look at media from a fictional perspective; it gives us a chance to examine ourselves and each other. Fridging not only leads to a misogynistic way of thinking, but it also shows that this is the status quo media wants to protect.

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t consume media; I could only write this much about Green Lantern and Batman because I’ve read a lot of those comics. I’m sure Iron Man would be a good example, but I haven’t read many Iron Man comics. We should spend our leisure time enjoying what we love. Just remember, if we don’t work on conditioning ourselves, someone else will.

    Feminism and dialectical materialism pair well together. Dialectics helps us understand how things are interconnected. The quality of a piece of media is not limited to how entertaining it is; it also includes who produced it and its effect on the consumer. How something affects and is affected by its environment is crucial to understanding it. Feminism can show us what qualities to look for. Media produced by men for men, with little input or consideration for women, often ends up with sexist undertones, even if it is entertaining.

    We are what we eat, or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Sometimes (or: Perhaps?) the most radical thing we can do to take control over our worldview is to be critical of what we consume. We can seek out media that helps shape a revolutionary perspective.

    I’d really like to know what my readers think. Tell me who you would hench for in the comments.

    Zeta Mail

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Any account of the decades-long occupation of Palestine from a Palestinian is immediately expected to be refined within a specific lens to appeal to the pathos of Western society. Well meaning activists, journalists and politicians may intend to share the stories of Palestinians, but too often end up curating them into a digestible format, one adjacent to the truth rather than one that embodies the whole of it. In other words, society forces Palestinians to justify and format their identities, experiences and traumas in order to be seen. Yet through this process, crucial pieces of their stories are sacrificed.

    The post Chris Hedges Report: Perfect Victims And The Politics Of Appeal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Read original story in Tibetan

    As Tibetan students return to school for the spring term, they are being subjected to propaganda movies about heroic Chinese soldiers and storytelling contests extolling the greatness of the Communist Party, according to sources inside Tibet and state media reports.

    Students and teachers across Tibet are also being told to abandon “superstitious” thinking in a bid to eliminate Tibetan Buddhism, two sources from the region said.

    The renewed push for patriotic education is the latest example of Beijing seeking to eradicate Tibetan culture and assimilate all ethnic groups into the majority Han Chinese culture.

    State-run media reports say the campaign is aimed at promoting “ethnic unity” and cultivating the “red gene” in Tibetan children — a term that refers to the Communist Party’s revolutionary spirit and history. They include images of teachers showing propaganda movies to children.

    According to the two sources, teachers must provide in-depth explanations on “Chinese national spirit and warmth” and guide students about China’s socialist system under something called the “First Lesson of the Year.”

    Teachers must also boost students’ understanding of the “four consciousnesses” and achieve the “two safeguards” –- both of which refer to efforts to modernize Chinese society and upholding party rule with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the core, the two sources said on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

    Students are shown videos of the Dingri earthquake relief work, to combine ideological and political education using examples of quake aid, at a school in Nyingtri county, Tibet, March 8, 2025.
    Students are shown videos of the Dingri earthquake relief work, to combine ideological and political education using examples of quake aid, at a school in Nyingtri county, Tibet, March 8, 2025.
    (Citizen Photo)

    “We will certainly see more and more of education being used for propaganda purposes,” said Harsh V. Pant, vice president of studies and foreign policy at New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation and a professor of international relations at King’s College London.

    “This will manifest both in terms of official government policy, as well as in terms of how gradually the younger generation will be indoctrinated with certain ideas about China and its role in Tibet,” he told Radio Free Asia.

    ‘Red stories’

    Last month, the County Education Bureau of Pelbar (or Banbar in Chinese) County at Chamdo in the Tibet Autonomous Region launched an online storytelling competition for primary and secondary school children to narrate “red stories” about the greatness of the party.

    The competition resulted in 44 video submissions, with more than 100 students and parents taking part in the activity, county level announcements said.

    Students across the region have also been shown videos about the recent relief work conducted in Dingri County, where an earthquake struck in January, killing at least 126 people.

    Officials in the video said the work has “closely combined ideological and political education with vivid examples” from earthquake relief.

    The Public Security Bureau of Suo County carries out publicity activity at the county's middle school in Nyingtri county, Tibet,on March 8, 2025.
    The Public Security Bureau of Suo County carries out publicity activity at the county’s middle school in Nyingtri county, Tibet,on March 8, 2025.
    (Citizen Photo)

    The recent push in Tibetan schools stems from the October 2023 Patriotic Education Law, which put central and regional departments in charge of patriotic education efforts.

    “The government’s work report specifically highlighted political and ideological education as a priority alongside skills training, so the emphasis on the spread of propaganda in schools is likely to be higher,” said Anushka Saxena, a research analyst at Bengaluru, India-based Takshashila Institution.

    Abandon ‘superstitious’ thinking

    Authorities are also telling teachers and students to abandon religious and “superstitious” thinking in schools in a bid to eliminate Tibetan Buddhism and language study, the two sources said.

    The Chinese government issued directives on Feb. 25 entitled “Two Absolute Prohibitions” and “Five Absolute Restrictions” which includes strict bans on religious propagation in schools, the use of religious elements in the education system and the participation of teachers and students in religious activities.

    The directives also prohibit the wearing or carrying of religious symbols or clothing in schools.

    “Teachers are instructed to report to authorities every month, confirming that they are not teaching any religious course to their students while many Tibetan teachers are being dismissed citing lack of proficiency in Chinese as the reason,” the second source said.

    These policies are designed to strip children of their Tibetan identity and nature, said Tsewang Dorji, a research fellow at the Dharamsala, North India-based Tibet Policy Institute.

    “Xi Jinping’s emphasis on making education a priority will intensify these efforts,” he said. “And if such policies about political and ideological education continue to persist in the next 10 to 20 years, Tibetan language, culture, identity and Buddhism is under huge threat.”

    Translated by Tenzin Palmo. Edited by Tenzin Pema, Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Tenzin Norzom and Tenzin Tenkyong for RFA Tibetan.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Image by Johannes Plenio.

    One bright spot amidst all the terrible news last couple of months was the market’s reaction to DeepSeek, with BigTech firms like Nvidia and Microsoft and Google taking major hits in their capitalizations. Billionaires Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who had, just a few days back, been part of Donald Trump’s first news conference—lost a combined 48 billion dollars in paper money. As a good friend of mine, who shall go unnamed because of their use of an expletive, said “I hate all AI, but it’s hard to not feel joy that these asshats are losing a lot of money.”

    Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactor), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.

    Remembering Past Ranfare

    But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.

    As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for V. C. Summer.

    The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019. In fact, South Carolina Electric & Gas Company’s energy sales declined by 3 percent by the time 2016 rolled in. [Such mistakes are standard in the history of nuclear power. In the 1970s, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and utility companies were projecting that “about one thousand large nuclear power reactors” would be built “by the year 2000 and about two thousand, mostly breeder reactors, by 2010” on the basis of the grossly exaggerated estimates of how rapidly electricity production would grow during the same period. It turned out that “utilities were projecting four to nine times more electric power would be produced in the United States by nuclear power in 2000 than actually happened”.] In the case of South Carolina, the wrong projection about energy sales was the basis of the $9 billion plus spent on the abandoned V. C. Summer project.

    The Racket Continues

    With no sense of shame for that failure, one of the two companies involved in that fiasco recently expressed an interest in selling this project. On January 22, Santee Cooper’s President and CEO wrote, “We are seeing renewed interest in nuclear energy, fueled by advanced manufacturing investments, AI-driven data center demand, and the tech industry’s zero-carbon targets…Considering the long timelines required to bring new nuclear units online, Santee Cooper has a unique opportunity to explore options for Summer Units 2 and 3 and their related assets that could allow someone to generate reliable, carbon emissions-free electricity on a meaningfully shortened timeline”.

    A couple of numbers to put those claims about timelines in perspective: the average nuclear reactor takes about 10 years to go from the beginning of construction—usually marked by when concrete is poured into the ground—to when it starts generating electricity. But one cannot go from deciding to build a reactor to pouring concrete in the ground overnight. It takes about five to ten years needed before the physical activities involved in building a reactor to obtain the environmental permits, and the safety evaluations, carry out public hearings (at least where they are held), and, most importantly, raise the tens of billions of dollars needed. Thus, even the “meaningfully shortened timeline” will mean upwards of a decade.

    Going by the aftermath of the Deepseek, the AI and data center driven energy demand bubble seems to have crashed on a timeline far shorter than even that supposedly “meaningfully shortened timeline”. There is good reason to expect that this AI bubble wasn’t going to last, for there was no real business case to allow for the investment of billions. What DeepSeek did was to also show that the billions weren’t needed. As Emily Bender, a computer scientist who co-authored the famous paper about large language models that coined the term stochastic parrots, put it: “The emperor still has no clothes, but it’s very distressing to the emperor that their non-clothes can be made so much more cheaply.”

    But utility companies are not giving up. At a recent meeting organized by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying organization for the nuclear industry, the Chief Financial Officer of Constellation Energy, the company owning the most nuclear reactors in the United States, admitted that the DeepSeek announcement “wasn’t a fun day” but maintained that it does not “change the demand outlook for power from the data economy. It’s going to come.” Likewise, during an “earnings call” earlier in February, Duke Energy President Harry Sideris maintained that data center hyperscalers are “full speed ahead”.

    Looking Deeper

    Such repetition, even in the face of profound questions about whether such a growth will occur is to be expected, for it is key to the stock price evaluations and market capitalizations of these companies. The constant reiteration of the need for more and more electricity and other resources also adopts other narrative devices shown to be effective in a wide variety of settings, for example, pointing to the possibility that China would take the lead in some technological field or the other, and explicitly or implicitly arguing how utterly unacceptable that state of affairs would be. Never asking whether it even matters who wins this race for AI. These tropes and assertions about running out of power contribute to creating the economic equivalent of what Stuart Hall termed “moral panic”, thus allowing possible opposition to be overruled.

    One effect of this slew of propaganda has been the near silence on the question of whether such growth of data centers or AI is desirable, even though there is ample evidence of the enormous environmental impacts of developing AI and building hyperscale data centers. Or for that matter the desirability of nuclear power.

    As Lewis Mumford once despaired: “our technocrats are so committed to the worship of the sacred cow of technology that they say in effect: Let the machine prevail, though the earth be poisoned, the air be polluted, the food and water be contaminated, and mankind itself be condemned to a dreary and useless life, on a planet no more fit to support life than the sterile surface of the moon”.

    But, of course, we live in a time of monsters. At a time when the levers of power are wielded by a megalomaniac who would like to colonize Mars, and despoil its already sterile environment.

    The post Continued Propaganda About AI and Nuclear Power appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


    This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by M.V. Ramana.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.