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Category: Propaganda

  • No, Australia Does Not Actually Need To Prepare For War With China

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    In the latest instance of the Australian media’s deluge of propaganda geared toward manufacturing consent for war with China, Nine Entertainment-owned newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have brought together a panel of “experts” to assess how well-prepared Australia is for a hot war with its primary trading partner. The question of if that war is necessary or should be prepared for is left completely unexamined.

    In a report titled “Australia faces the threat of war with China within three years – and we’re not ready,” we learn the names of the five “experts” SMH and The Age have recruited to make the titular claim, and you’re never going to believe this but it turns out they tend to work in professions that are intimately intertwined with the western imperial war machine.

    This first “expert” is Mick Ryan, whom I have written about repeatedly because he seems to feature in literally every single Australian news media piece geared toward propagandizing Australians into accepting war with China as an inevitability which must be prepared for. Ryan is an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which is funded by military-industrial complex entities like Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and is also directly funded by the US government and its client states, including Australia and Taiwan. SMH and The Age make no note of this immense conflict of interest.

    The second “expert” is Peter Jennings, who is a Senior Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), where he was the executive director for ten years. Like CSIS, ASPI is a think tank that is funded by US-aligned governments and the military-industrial complex. It has played a major role in manufacturing consent for the foreign policy agendas of the western empire, particularly in escalations against China. ASPI has been described as “the propaganda arm of the CIA and the US government” by Australian diplomat Bruce Haigh.

    The third “expert” is Lavina Lee, an academic who is a Council Member with ASPI and an Adjunct Fellow with CSIS, so when it comes to pro-war punditry she’s what they call a twofer.

    The fourth “expert” is Australian defense insider Lesley Seebeck, a regular ASPI contributor. Seebeck is the chairperson of a swampy warmongering think tank of unclear funding called the National Institute of Strategic Resilience, which publishes woke-imperialist articles with titles like “First Nations Drone Network Project Initiation,” “Solomon Islands – time to take an Indigenous perspective,” “Building Australia’s Strategic Resilience: A Spotlight on Military and Gender in the Pacific Region,” and “Key to Australia’s Strategic Resilience: An Australian Feminist Foreign Policy,” the latter two authored by Seebeck herself.

    The fifth is Alan Finkel, a scientist who works for the Australian government.

    Again, none of these conflicts of interest were mentioned by The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age, which as we’ve discussed previously is an egregious act of journalistic malpractice. This is a little like gathering Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Taco Bell chihuahua to discuss whether the government should employ fast food outlets to supply school lunches. Except these guys aren’t selling junk food — they’re selling mass murder, human suffering, ecological disaster, and the violent deaths of our children.

    There are rivers of tax money at stake here; delicious, Reserve-backed dollars straight into the old bank account, mountains of them! And essentially these people are the forward-facing public representatives of those companies whose job it is to sell the public on an outcome that directly benefits their backers. This is an elaborate advertorial and it is incredible that The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age not only ran it as news, but hosted it.

    These five “experts” conclude that Australia needs to do much more to rapidly prepare for a hot war with China, saying that “The need to dramatically strengthen our military and national security capabilities is urgent, but Australia is unprepared.” They say Australia must make these dramatic changes not to defend itself from a Chinese invasion, but to fight a war over Taiwan.

    “The war Xi is preparing for, they say, is one fought over Taiwan, a prosperous self-governing island of 24 million people that sits about 160 kilometres east of mainland China,” the report reads.

    This is entirely in line with the appalling propaganda piece put out by Murdoch’s Sky News last month, which said Australia must double its military budget to prepare to back the US in a hot war over Taiwan.

    The panelists paint Australia’s participation in this war as a settled matter, an inevitability should the US wage war on China.

    “We have made our choice. If the United States goes to war with Taiwan, we are going to support them one way or the other,” says Mick Ryan.

    “Neither the Australian military nor the public are presently truly prepared for the outbreak of war and Australia’s inevitable participation,” says Lavina Lee.

    These military industrial complex-funded pundits are lying. Australia’s participation in an American war against China is not an inevitability, and is not necessary.

    In reality, the best way Australia can protect itself from China is not to prepare for war with China. A hot war with our primary trading partner would destroy our economy and would likely cut off most of the imports we require to function as an island nation. We’ve got no business preparing to throw our nation’s sons and daughters into such a conflict, and we’ve got no business stealing from our nation’s most needful in order to effect that preparation.

    An unresolved civil war between two adjacent bodies who both call themselves “China” is none of Washington’s business, and it is certainly none of Canberra’s. Let the Chinese sort out China, because China poses no threat to us.

    That last point isn’t actually debatable, by the way. As Antiwar’s Daniel Larison recently noted on Twitter, China’s military budget consistently sits at around 1.5 percent of its GDP, which is less than half of the USA’s. If China were preparing to conquer the world as so many hawks falsely claim, this would not be the case. The US is a nation with an interest in global domination, and its military budget reflects this. China is not a nation with an interest in global domination, and its military budget reflects this.

    In reality the US has been encircling China with more and war machinery for years in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled, and has been preparing for a confrontation with Beijing for a very long time. The US is plainly the aggressor here, and Australia now has an existential interest in militarily uncoupling from that aggressor before it gets us all killed.

    The report by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — which former Prime Minister Paul Keating just called “the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life” —  actually comes close to actually admitting that there’s a concerted propaganda campaign designed to increase hysteria about China and manufacture consent for war. The “expert” panel asserts that there needs to be a “psychological shift” in the public toward this direction which they must be actively persuaded to accept.

    “Most important of all is a psychological shift,” the report says. “Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over.”

    The report cites Seebeck as saying “the nation’s leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion,” and that the public must be regarded as “smart enough to talk about defence and national security.”

    The reason they are saying the public needs to be spoken to and persuaded to psychologically accept hawkish escalations against China is because no sane person would consent to such madness if they weren’t psychologically manipulated into it. No sane person would consent to agendas which threaten to kill our sons and daughters, impoverish us all, and even turn us into nuclear targets without copious amounts of propaganda.

    That’s why we’re seeing all these “news” reports about how urgent it is to prepare for war with China all of a sudden. Not because China poses a threat to us, but because we are allied with an empire that is planning to start a war of unfathomable horror.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • All US Presidents are War Criminals

    This is a US war on Russia. Period.

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

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

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

    Anglo-US Empire struggling to keep things as they are

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Why the US attempted to topple Pakistan’s government

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

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

    The American Empire is in a war against humanity

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Papuan rebels deny asking for money, weapons to free NZ pilot – ‘that’s just propaganda’

    Jubi News in Jayapura

    The West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) has denied Indonesian media claims that Egianus Kogoya, the commander of a TPNPB faction, asked for money and weapons to free the New Zealand pilot they are holding hostage.

    “No, we never asked for money and weapons in exchange for releasing pilot Philip Mark Mehrtens. That’s just propaganda from the Indonesian security forces,” said TPNPB spokesperson Sebby Sambom.

    “This is a political issue, the New Zealand pilot is a guarantee of political negotiations.”

    Previously, Papua Police spokesperson Senior Commander Ignatius Benny Ady Prabowo had said the police would not follow a request for firearms and cash in exchange for releasing the Susi Air pilot.

    “That was their request at the beginning. But of course we don’t respond. We will not give weapons that will later be used to shoot the authorities and terrorise the community,” Prabowo told reporters.

    ‘Psychologically disturbing’
    The Papuan Church Council said the capture of Philip Mehrtens as a hostage was “psychologically disturbing” for his wife, family and children.

    The council demanded that the pilot be released in an open letter. With his release, of Philip Mark Mehrtens, the council said Kogoya would get sympathy from the global community and the people of Indonesia.

    “There must be a neutral mediator or negotiator trusted by both the TPNPB, the community, and the government to release the pilot. Otherwise, many victims will fall,” said Reverend Socratez Sofyan Yoman, a member of the Papuan Church Council.

    A New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said the welfare of its citizens was a top priority.

    “We are doing everything we can, including deploying New Zealand consular staff to ensure the safe release of our citizen taken hostage,” she said.

    The spokesperson added that New Zealand was working closely with Indonesian authorities to ensure the safe release of Mehrtens.

    Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

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

    On February 25, Elon Musk tweeted, “That election was arguably dodgy, but no question that there was indeed a coup.” By “That election,” he was referring to Viktor Yanukovych’s having won the Presidency of Ukraine in an election about which even the British Guardian newspaper had headlined on 8 February 2010, “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair,” and it made clear that even Western international observers in Ukraine were testifying to the authenticity of that electoral win by Yanukovych: “Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said there were no indications of serious fraud and described the vote as an ‘impressive display’ of democracy.” However, Elon Musk, without citing any evidence, was now saying otherwise: that Yanukovych’s win had been “arguably dodgy” — and (despite that tweet) he provided no argument at all to back up that ‘arguably’ allegation.

    It is foolish to cite tweets that have no links to any evidence, as being evidence for anything other than the tweeter had made that assertion. As a general rule, tweets are the least-reliable source of information. Certainly Musk’s tweet was. However, he also said there that there was “no question that there was indeed a coup.” Anyone who has at all followed the evidence on that matter knows that it unquestionably was a coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014; and even the head of the “private-CIA” firm Stratfor said on 19 December 2014 that the overthrow of Yanukovych that had occurred then was “the most blatant coup in history.” It was that, because the evidence that it was is not only this smoking gun that it was a U.S. coup, but because there was plenty more of high quality evidence and all of it showed the same thing: it was a coup by (or “on behalf of”) the Obama Administration. (Obama and his team, and all ‘allied’ countries, however, and all of the Western news-media, called it instead a ‘democratic revolution’. This is George Orwell’s 1984 made real. It’s not real history, but real deceit.)

    The fools who follow Musk’s opinions should know that he himself thinks that coups are just fine: when Elon Musk received on 24 July 2020 a tweet from an “Armani” saying, “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there [for Tesla cars’ batteries].” Later that day, Musk replied:

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

    He likes coups that profit himself personally, but apparently there are some coups that he disfavors — and he doesn’t ever explain (or at least not honestly) why. Maybe, for twitter-followers, “why” just isn’t an interesting question? (Maybe that’s why they use social media — instead of articles like this, that link to their primary sources — to ‘know’ what’s ‘going on’ in ‘the news’?)

    Musk’s stupid tweet about Ukraine was likewise in response to something that one of his followers had tweeted: He was responding to one of his twitter followers, “KanekoaTheGreat” having tweeted quoting Professor John Mearsheimer who said in the September/October 2014 issue of America’s most prestigious — and strongly pro-U.S.-empire or “neoconservative” or pro-Military-Industrial-Complex — Foreign Affairs magazine, “For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’—was the final straw.” Ultimately, that’s what Musk was responding to — not the evidence, but instead the opinion there, in that overwhelmingly pro-U.S.-coups and empire magazine, from (as it turns out) a professor who was arguing that the coup had been merely (and only) a mistake:

    On February 17, under the headline “John Mearsheimer’s Misrepresentations In Order To Be Allowed Space On U.S. Propaganda-Media (i.e., U.S. ‘News’-Media),” I had pointed out numerous distortions of the historical record regarding that coup — such as his alleging it to have been due to a “flawed view” (not a vicious, or even just a “false” view, but merely “flawed”. He doesn’t so much as hint in what way “flawed”) including “such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy,” which “went awry in Ukraine [and, again, he doesn’t hint at in what way ‘awry’],” and on and on — as-if it weren’t what it actually was: which was the U.S. Government’s bipartisan neoconservative obsession to trap Russia’s Government, to checkmate it into its being forced to yield, finally and inexorably, to the control by the U.S. Government. That’s imperialism — and there wasn’t a word about it — except one passing reference, which was 180 degrees in the false direction: against actually the victim-country, not against the aggressor:

    In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

    And that distractive and deceptive reference is to Russia’s ‘imperialism’, NOT to America’s own authentic hyper-imperialism that Russia is now responding to (and which imperialism entails a military budget that now (including what’s hidden in non-‘Defense’-Department agencies but is still for military purposes) is half of the entire world’s military spending, and it pays for 900 foreign military bases and much more that is counterproductive if it has any real impact at all on protecting U.S. national security. (It’s not “the Defense Department”; it is “the Aggression Department.”)

    This is the hidden reality: and neither Musk nor Mearsheimer, nor any other mouthpiece of the U.S. Establishment or the “Deep State” lets its audience in on it — and on the evidence that this is the reality.

    The U.S. coup against and that grabbed Ukraine was a very intentional, and very evil — not at all unintentional or ‘by mistake’ — U.S. coup, and Putin is being villainized in U.S.-and-allied media for finally responding to it in Russia’s case. Not only was it “a coup” but it was a U.S. coup, and it was by careful and evil design, no mere (nor Mearsheimer) ‘error’.

    This is — on steroids — the 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse: Ukraine is only a 300-mile or five-minute missile-flying-time distance away from the Kremlin and decapitation of Russia’s ability to fire-off its retaliatory weapons (within less than five minutes) against a U.S. blitz-attack. Russia needs to prevent that.

    “The West” — including all of NATO — are 100% the aggressors in this matter. And that fact is unmentionable in U.S.-and-allied media.

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

    The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working: we think we *look* stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually *become* weaker vs. China.

    Perhaps in foreign affairs, while the Democrats (liberal fascists) will be campaigning for war against Russia to precede war against China, the Republicans (conservative fascists) will be campaigning for war against China to precede war against Russia. It’ll be a contest about which ‘enemy’ to hate first. Either way, the owners of mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil will be beaming. They’re the real constituency in this ‘democracy’.

    It’s like: Will the flavor be chocolate, or will it be vanilla? Either way, it’ll be loaded with sugar, artificial flavoring, and artificial coloring, and will fatten you, and rot your teeth just the same, no matter how different the taste is. And those are the only two ‘choices’. That’s all the billionaires are offering, in the political market. Truth isn’t anywhere on the menu, from either Party.

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    In an article published last week titled “US working with ‘Five Eyes’ nations, Japan on information warfare,” a publication on military intelligence and communications technology called C4ISRNET reports that the US and its allies are collaborating “to share and sharpen information-warfare techniques in the Indo-Pacific” with the goal of “countering” the “increasingly aggressive China.”

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Dialogues and exchanges of best practices are ongoing with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and other countries including Japan, according to Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, commander of Naval Information Forces.

     

    “I want to say we have at least a dozen countries or so that are either establishing information warfare programs, or are interested in partnering further in the information warfare realm,” she said Feb. 15 at the West 2023 conference in San Diego. “We are leaning in there, we are focused.”

     

    Japan, specifically, has expressed significant interest in information warfare, “in a really positive way,” Aeschbach told C4ISRNET. Japan and Australia, among others, are considered critical U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, a region national security officials are invested in as they seek to counter an increasingly aggressive China.

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

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

    Libertarian Institute’s Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman have a good write-up on this latest revelation in which they explain that information warfare is “a broad swath of military operations a country can use to disrupt another” which “can include spreading disinformation or preventing the spread of information.”

    As Anzalone and Freeman note, one significant recent instance of the US government’s acknowledged use of information warfare was when US officials told NBC News that the US government has been deliberately circulating unsubstantiated information to western news media “as part of an information war against Russia.”

    Which is to say, they lied. When you do things like telling New York Times reporters that “Russia asked China to give it military equipment and support for the war in Ukraine after President Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion last month,” only to have NBC report that you knew this claim “lacked hard evidence,” you lied. You used your country’s mass media institutions to circulate disinformation.

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    US Officials Admit They're Literally Just Lying To The Public About Russia

    "And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to."https://t.co/mYBJ4kQhk8

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 7, 2022

    Which is of course standard operating procedure for the US empire; the mass media have always been propaganda institutions used to manufacture consent for the economic and geopolitical status quo upon which the media-owning class has built its empire. Propaganda is nothing new, including propaganda against China. The difference now is that empire managers are getting increasingly comfortable with publicly acknowledging this fact, probably because the notion that the west needs to fight its own “information war” against its enemies has been gaining increasingly widespread traction since 2016.

    And as I keep reiterating, the bizarre thing about this belief is that the propaganda from empire-targeted governments has virtually zero existence in the western world, while western propaganda dominates our information ecosystem. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according to Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

    So we can expect to see a multinational coordinated propaganda campaign against China, which could easily eclipse the anti-China propaganda campaign we’ve seen thus far, and could easily end up making the one against Russia look like child’s play.

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    They're Not Worried About "Russian Influence", They're Worried About Dissent

    One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda.https://t.co/qf10kuPteV

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 5, 2023

    It should infuriate everyone that our rulers are now flagrantly admitting that they manipulate our information environment to advance their own strategic interests. The only reason it doesn’t is because westerners are already so propagandized to the gills that the notion that our rulers should lie to us for our own good has gained so much traction that the empire can now openly imprison journalists for trying to tell us the truth. 

    In writing this practice is called “lampshading”, where you defuse any objection your audience might have to a glaring plot hole in your narrative by simply acknowledging that it’s there and then moving on. In this case the audience is every news-consuming person in the western world, and the narrative is the story the west has about itself.

    Everything the western empire accuses its enemies of doing, it itself does far more egregiously. Westerners think of people in China as brainwashed victims of propaganda and censorship living in a power-serving homogenized information bubble, but that’s exactly what’s happening in our own society. And what’s worse, most westerners don’t even know it. And what’s even worse, they have the temerity to feel self-righteous about what free-thinking and free-speaking individualists they are compared to people in China.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • “That Paper Is Dead”

    On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning:

    ‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’

    This was in response to the news that British supermarkets are rationing fresh produce, including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Rationing could last weeks. The shortages were caused by ‘poor weather’, as the Guardian put it, in southern Europe and north Africa. In fact, in June and July 2022, extreme heatwaves caused temperatures to climb above 40 degrees Celsius in places and broke many long-standing records. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record. In North Africa, Tunisia endured a heatwave and fires that damaged the country’s grain crop. On 13 July 2022, in the capital city of Tunis, the temperature reached 48 degrees Celsius, breaking a 40-year record.

    As well as harvest losses in southern Europe and north Africa last year, there has been a reduction in UK salad produce after field crops were badly damaged by frost before Christmas. Food supply problems have been compounded by the rising energy costs of growing plants in heated greenhouses.

    Although there was some media coverage of fresh produce rationing by supermarkets, including on the front pages, there was little more than passing mention of the systemic connection to the climate crisis. And, par for the course, no headlines or in-depth analysis of the urgent need to shift course from the current path of corporate-driven destruction. Nothing about the very real risk that we are already undergoing the collapse of modern civilisation.

    It was symptomatic, once again, of the deeply propagandised society in which we live.

    In our previous media alert, we noted the silence across virtually the whole of the state-corporate media in response to legendary journalist Seymour Hersh’s report that the US blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines delivering cheap gas from Russia to Europe.

    In a public debate, the renowned US economist Jeffrey Sachs said that:

    ‘The Swedes went in to clean up the debris [following the explosive destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines] and said, “We cannot share our findings with Germany because of national security” […]. How could Sweden not share its findings with Germany and Denmark? But their job was to clean up so nobody else could investigate either.’

    This two-minute clip is extraordinary (as is the full 8-minute video). But the lack of ‘mainstream’ reporting? It is as if the whole of journalism has just…vanished.

    Sachs said that he spoke with ‘a leading reporter of one of our leading papers’ whom he has known for forty years. Sachs told his friend that he believed the US carried out the attack on Nord Stream. The reporter replied, ‘Of course the US did it.’

    Sachs responded, ‘Why doesn’t your paper say so?’

    The reporter blamed his editors. ‘It’s hard; it’s complicated.’

    Sachs continued:

    ‘When I was young, I used to read your newspaper, because you went after Nixon and Watergate, and because you published the Pentagon Papers.’

    The reporter replied: ‘Yes, but that paper is dead.’

    In fact, one might as well say that all the ‘leading papers’ are dead.

    The function of what passes for ‘journalism’ is ever more clear: to propagandise the population to allow ‘national interests’ to determine foreign and domestic policy. These ‘national interests’ are the billionaire class that own the country, and the political, military and intelligence forces that run the country.

    They are still terrified of even the prospect of a leftward shift in society, following the near-success of Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour in the 2017 General Election. That is why it is so important for establishment stooge Sir Keir Starmer to be promoted across the permissible ‘spectrum’ of news and opinion as the next safe pair of hands to maintain the status quo of power and a monarch-supporting establishment. The Guardian now has a permanent section on its opinion page titled: ‘Starmer’s path to power’.

    It is worth highlighting the insidious role played by Starmer, when head of the Crown Prosecution Service, in the persecution of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, as John Pilger reminded viewers in a recent interview:

    ‘Starmer’s CPS deliberately kept Julian in this country when the Swedes were saying, “That’s it. We’ve had enough.” […] it was Starmer’s CPS that kept it going [the case against Assange.]’

    Starmer has now said that Corbyn cannot stand as a Labour candidate in the next election. Indeed, he has essentially said that the left is no longer welcome in the Labour Party:

    ‘If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave.’

    As Financial Times journalist Stephen Smith pointed out on Twitter:

    ‘It’s amazing how Labour have calculated they will never need these voters, or all the people these voters could influence in the future’.

    The liberal media are happy with this state of affairs. Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer at the Observer and deputy opinion editor at the Guardian, published an opinion piece last Sunday under the title, ‘Keir Starmer was right to exile Corbyn. Labour has a duty to voters, not rebellious members’. It would take an entire media alert to go through her column, line by line, to point out all the egregious distortions and deceptions.

    In one sense, it was remarkable that the Observer would publish a piece so riddled with untruths and distortions. That it was written by the paper’s chief leader writer is even more astonishing. But, in fact, it is not remarkable at all. This abysmal low standard – a babbling brook of bullshit, to quote Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David – is entirely predictable from the Observer/Guardian stable of establishment ‘journalism’.

    This statement alone was appalling:

    ‘Corbyn has never apologised for the role he played in the institutional antisemitism that characterised the party under his leadership, including interference in the complaints process by his own staff…’

    This was cynical fiction. There was no ‘institutional antisemitism’ under Corbyn. As for ‘interference in the complaints process’, the Al Jazeera ‘Labour Files’ series blew a hole through this narrative. As the series showed, Corbyn had been stymied by the party’s central bureaucracy which resisted the leftward shift his victory had initiated when elected as Labour leader in 2015. When he was finally able to have Labour general secretary Iain McNicol (now Baron McNicol of West Kilbride) replaced by Corbyn ally Jennie Formby in 2018, the painfully slow processing of disciplinary cases on antisemitism came to light. It was swiftly improved under Corbyn. The Observer’s leader writer is continuing to use the same debunked nonsense which the media used then to attack Corbyn.

    Political writer Simon Maginn has exposed ten fraudulent tropes of the supposed ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’ that are constantly recycled to this day. For instance, Guardian columnist Rafael Behr indulged in a disgusting live attack on Corbyn, and the left, on the BBC Politics Live show earlier this week. Under Corbyn, Behr claimed, Labour ‘became infested with anti-Jewish racism’; he was ‘a magnet for anti-semitism’. This was utterly false. And this is a regular, high-profile columnist from a supposedly progressive newspaper!

    As the composer and musician Matt Scott pointed out on Twitter:

    ‘Antisemitism levels went down under Jeremy Corbyn & were lower than in the general public by all known evidence.’

    It was such an appalling diatribe from Behr, that if the BBC had any standards at all, that would have been his last appearance.

    As Matt Kennard, co-founder of Declassified UK, noted:

    ‘The Labour “antisemitism crisis” propaganda campaign only stayed robust because critical analysis of the campaign – and its pushers – was locked out of the mainstream media.’

    Kennard added:

    ‘It was critical the Guardian’s left-wing columnists either joined in the campaign, like Owen Jones, or took an oath of silence, like George Monbiot. That way anyone telling the truth about it was restricted to independent media and easily dismissed as a “crank” or “antisemite”.’

    Monbiot was hardly ‘silent’. In 2018, for example, he tweeted:

    ‘It dismays me to say it, as someone who has invested so much hope in the current Labour Party, but I think @shattenstone [Guardian features writer Simon Hattenstone] is right: Jeremy Corbyn’s 2013 comments about “Zionists” were antisemitic and unacceptable.’

    Monbiot tweeted this over a screen grab of Hattenstone’s Guardian article titled:

    ‘I gave Corbyn the benefit of the doubt on antisemitism. I can’t any more.’

    It could hardly have been more damning.

    Self-Awareness In Short Supply

    The current fever pitch of propaganda about Ukraine and Russia, now surely far surpassing that which preceded and followed the West’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, is all the more galling because we are supposed to swallow the notion that we live in a propaganda-free society. Propaganda, we are told, is the preserve of the Official Enemy (insert Russia/China/North Korea/Iran/Venezuela/etc, as required). We (the ‘civilised’ West, creator of universal human rights, moral values and true democracy, etc) have responsible, fair and informative media.

    Yes, of course, it is grudgingly admitted, there’s the tabloid press filled with tittle-tattle, fluff, tawdry scandals and other diversionary nonsense. But, we have ‘quality’ newspapers and broadcast media, such as the Times, the Independent, the Guardian and Channel 4 News. Heck, we have BBC News: the world’s ‘most trusted’ international news organisation (as they keep reminding us).

    But we could easily fill pages daily with examples of BBC News propaganda (quite apart from the endless omissions that are a fundamental feature of BBC News). Choosing a ‘winner’ each day would be tough. But the BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg is often a serious contender.  Reporting recently from the Russian city of Belgorod, just 40km north of the border with Ukraine, he observed that: ‘Belgorod locals live in fear but won’t blame Putin’.

    He wrote:

    ‘In addition to the slogans on the street, there’s also the propaganda on Russian state TV. From morning till night news bulletins and talk shows assure viewers that Russia is in the right; that Ukraine and the West are the aggressors and that in this conflict the very future of Russia is at stake.’

    Adding: ‘The messaging works.’

    As an example, Rosenberg cited a local woman, Olga:

    ‘She accepts the official view – the version of events that much of the world dismisses as the Kremlin’s alternative reality.’

    The lack of self-awareness by Rosenberg – ‘the messaging works’ – is standard for a prominent journalist at the news organisation that has been pumping out state propaganda since its inception under Lord Reith.

    The serial dearth of news reporting and analysis that could offer some semblance of counterbalance to the Nato view of events in Ukraine is a damning indictment of BBC News and the rest of the national media.

    Perhaps, for many in the media and political circles, there is a genuine fear of challenging official doctrine lest one be smeared as a ‘Putin apologist’. It is a favoured, shameful tactic of Guardian columnist George Monbiot, for example, who has done an excellent job of trashing his own reputation.

    On 9 February, Monbiot tweeted:

    ‘There is a left – the majority – that’s principled and consistent in denouncing all imperialist war. And there’s another left, represented by Roger Waters, John Pilger, Media Lens etc, that denounces Western wars of aggression but makes excuses for Russian wars of aggression.’

    We replied:

    ‘Fake! We denounce both Western and Russian wars of aggression. Our media alert, 4 March 2022:

    ‘”Russia’s attack is a textbook example of ‘the supreme crime’, the waging of a war of aggression. So, too, was the 2003 US-UK invasion and occupation of Iraq.”’

    We asked Monbiot to explain how repeatedly denouncing Putin’s war of aggression was the same thing as making ‘excuses for Russian wars of aggression’. One of the Guardian’s highest-profile columnists then spent the morning trawling through our Twitter history until he eventually found an example of us retweeting someone who described Russia’s invasion as ‘provoked’. Monbiot considered this an example of us making ‘excuses’ for Putin. We cited Chomsky:

    ‘They know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA.’

    Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summed up his and our position exactly:

    ‘This really shouldn’t need stating. I focus on the West’s crimes, provocations and distortions not because I’m a Saddam, Assad, Putin apologist. I do so because I’m trying to fill in knowledge gaps for *western audiences* starved of critical information by western corporate media.

    ‘You don’t need more western propaganda from me. Your eyes and ears are stuffed with it. You need to hear other sides, and missing information, to be able to judge whether what you’re being told by the establishment media is true or propaganda.

    ‘Not least, you need that counter-information to judge whether the state-corporate media have a collective agenda – and whether that agenda is about empowering you against the establishment, or about empowering the establishment against you.’

    What is so remarkable about Monbiot’s relentless attacks on us is that he initially understood exactly what we were trying to do and why. In February 2005, he emailed us:

    ‘I know we’ve had disagreements in the past, but I wanted to send you a note of appreciation for your work. Your persistence seems to be paying off: it’s clear that many of the country’s most prominent journalists are aware of Medialens, read your bulletins and, perhaps, are beginning to feel the pressure. If, as I think you have, you have begun to force people working for newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right, and worry about being held to account for the untruths they disseminate, then you have already performed a major service to democracy. I feel you have begun to open up a public debate on media bias, which has been a closed book in the United Kingdom for a long time. As you would be the first to point out, this does not solve the problem of the corporate control of the media, but it does sow embarrasment [sic] in the ranks of the enemy, while reminding your readers of the need to seek alternative sources of information.

    ‘Your columns in the New Statesman have been effective in reaching a wider readership, and I’m glad the Guardian gave you a platform: have you tried to persuade the BBC to let you on? I’m thinking in particular of Radio 4’s programme The Message.

    ‘With my best wishes, George Monbiot’ (Monbiot, email to Media Lens, 2 February 2005)

    But here’s the problem: our ethical approach and rationale were exactly the same in 2005 as they are in 2023. How can Monbiot not understand now what he understood so clearly then: that we are indeed trying to persuade ‘newspapers and broadcasters to look over their left shoulders as well as their right’, to hold them accountable ‘for the untruths they disseminate’? Our work has nothing whatever to do with ‘apologising’ for tyranny. So, who changed: us or Monbiot?

    The Purple Prose Of BBC News

    Two weeks ago, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky came to London to give a speech pleading for fighter jets, to an adoring audience of the political and media establishment in Westminster Hall. BBC News waxed lyrical:

    ‘The 900-year-old medieval hall was bathed in sunlight from its vast stained glass windows, as MPs, peers, members of the clergy, reporters and assorted dignitaries assembled in an atmosphere of hushed anticipation.’

    Labour’s Stephen Doughty, a member of the all-party Ukraine group, was ‘among those left with a sense of awe’. He said of Zelensky:

    ‘He’s the real deal. You don’t get many leaders quite like that in the world.’

    At the end of his speech, Zelensky gave a ‘Churchillian “V for victory” sign’ as the Ukrainian national anthem played in the background. That, reported the BBC, ‘was the most powerful moment for’ Doughty, particularly:

    ‘as the stained glass windows that bathed the whole occasion in light are a memorial to the staff and members of both houses of Parliament who died in the Second World War.’

    Doughty added: ‘The symbolism of that is incalculable.’

    BBC impartiality was truly out the window – stained glass or otherwise – when a BBC reporter proclaimed to Zelensky: ‘Greetings, Mr. President, I would really like to hug you.’

    It was a propaganda show that would be mocked mercilessly here if something similar happened in Russia.

    Earlier this week, US president Joe Biden made a ‘surprise’ visit to Ukraine before heading on to Poland. His speeches were reported diligently and respectfully by Western media. Meanwhile, as the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approached, Vladimir Putin addressed the Russian people. A live BBC News page emphasised the key points for the BBC audience:

    ‘Putin suspends key US nuclear arms deal in bitter speech against West’

    ‘Putin rages against West’

    And: ‘[Putin] goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Washington’

    Can you imagine BBC News ever describing in similar terms a speech given by a US president or British prime minister? ‘Biden rages against Russia’

    Or: ‘Biden goes through a list of familiar grievances in an angry speech in Moscow’

    Media analyst Alan MacLeod drew attention in a powerful Twitter thread to the glaring contrast between: ‘When they do it vs. when we do it.’

    For example, the Time double issue of 14/21 March 2022 had a cover depicting a Russian tank invading Ukraine with the title: ‘The Return of History: How Putin Shattered Europe’s Dreams’

    By contrast, when the Time cover of 11 September 1995 depicted a huge explosion as Nato bombed Serbs in Bosnia, the title was: ‘Bringing the Serbs to Heel: A Massive Bombing Attack Opens the Door to Peace’

    This recalls Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s bizarre comment at the World Economic Forum that ‘weapons are the way to peace’.

    Truly, we are living in an Orwellian era.

    MacLeod also highlighted the title of a piece by Times columnist David Aaronovitch from 28 April, 2022: ‘Russia’s casual savagery is seared into its soul’

    By contrast, on 30 November 2017, the Times ran an opinion piece by Nigel Biggar, an Anglican priest and theologian, titled: ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’

    And on and on.

    In a brilliant ten-minute presentation by film director Ken Loach, he said:

    ‘The mass media are our enemy – they’ve declared war, and we know whose interests they represent.’

    Finally, perhaps, the left is beginning to understand the role of the Guardian, the BBC and the rest of the ‘MSM’ in maintaining the established system of power in the UK, including its endless support for war.

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Narrative Is Used To Override Healthy Human Self-Interest

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    It’s very odd how humans can be manipulated into acting against their own self-interest to the benefit of their rulers in ways that animals would never tolerate, just by exploiting the fact that we experience thoughts in our heads that animals do not experience.

    Take violence, for example. Predator animals survive by attacking and killing other animals for their own benefit, but as soon as a prey animal makes it clear that it’s not worth the effort, the predator will back off in its own self-interest. The predator understands instinctually that attacking a healthy bull elephant isn’t worth the risk to its own physical wellbeing, and even a wildebeest that proves stronger than expected will be backed off from. A broken bone or a nasty wound can mean the death of the predator, and even a prey animal that forces a predator to expend too much energy won’t be deemed worth the effort when there’s slower, weaker prey to be found.

    With less advanced organisms that animal self-interest often isn’t there. Ants for example will charge into battle to their certain death against much larger foes who pose a threat to their nest, instinctually valuing the collective wellbeing of the colony above their own lives. Honeybees will sacrifice their own lives to land a good sting on a threat to the hive, their stingers evolved so that they rip out their own guts when they pierce the flesh of their target.

    Humans, interestingly, fall somewhere between tiny-brained hive insects and the larger-brained mammals and birds in terms of self-preservation impulses involving violence, despite having the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom. We have the same instinctive aversions to putting ourselves at risk as those other animals, but that instinct can be overridden by putting a bunch of stories in our heads about how the enemy must be destroyed for this or that reason. A few false narratives about God and glory had humans marching off to fight and die in the Crusades like a bunch of mindless insects.

    This is because the capacity for abstract thought that our recently evolved brains have given us can be exploited by clever humans with a predisposition toward manipulation. Because we’re often finding our way around in the world by thoughts and language rather than instinct, we can be manipulated into acting far more foolishly than a pigeon or a squirrel or a tiger ever would.

    As humans have gotten better at sharing ideas and information with each other our awareness about what’s real and what’s false has expanded, so we don’t see as many manipulations involving God and glory anymore. Now more clever lies are required to get us charging off to war, like the need to spread freedom and democracy and protect our loved ones from terrorism.

    And the same dynamic is used to get us acting against our own interests to the benefit of our rulers throughout every aspect of human civilization, not just with war and violence. Our mental soundtracks are manipulated by propaganda into consenting to extremely abusive systems where people will be deprived of basic human needs if they can’t shape themselves into useful cogs in the machine of industry. Where money can be used for political influence, which can in turn be used to funnel more money to those who have lots of it from those who have very little. Where privacy for the individual is continuously eroded while secrecy for the government is continually thickened.

    Environmental destruction. Economic injustice and inequality. Rentier capitalism. Corruption. Steadily escalating police militarization. Soaring incarceration. Increasing internet censorship. And all while wealth and resources are taken from the people and poured toward global power agendas which do not benefit them, and which in fact impoverish them and endanger them as the empire’s “great power competition” against Russia and China rolls out economic warfare which empties their wallets and threatens their lives with nuclear brinkmanship.

    These are all egregious assaults on our wellbeing which would not be tolerated except for our susceptibility to mass-scale psychological manipulation. We are propagandized into accepting a level of personal sacrifice more appropriate for bees and ants than for highly evolved mammals, all because our relationship with thought makes it hard for us to distinguish reality from narrative.

    We’ve been manipulated into acting against our own self-interest to such an extent that we are now staring down the barrel of annihilation via nuclear war or environmental collapse. We are perilously close to becoming the first species on Earth to go extinct due to propaganda.

    What this means is that in its short time on this planet our species has already reached the adapt-or-die juncture that every species eventually hits in a world of continually changing conditions. What makes our situation unique is that the changing conditions we’re encountering have been caused by us, and the adaptation we’re going to have to make is in our own minds.

    Humans have the ability to dramatically alter their relationship with thought in a perceptual shift commonly referred to as spiritual enlightenment or awakening. The fact that this potential has been documented for thousands of years and exists within all of us is probably a clue as to what the invitation of this adapt-or-die juncture actually is. If humanity survives, it will be because something shifted in us which caused us to lose the sticky, entangled relationship with thought which made it so easy for ill-intentioned manipulators to drag us this way and that by our minds.

    I actually believe we can make that jump, though I also suspect that we have the freedom to fail. If we make it, we can finally join our animal cousins in a way of living that isn’t dominated by mental narrative. And from there we can start building a world that benefits ourselves, and everyone else as well.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • What We Know About The US Air Force’s Balloon Party So Far

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    You know, everyone’s always talking about how the US military is only ever used to kill foreigners for resource control and generate profits for the military-industrial complex, but that’s not entirely true. Turns out the US military is also used for shooting down party balloons.

    In an article titled “Object downed by US missile may have been amateur hobbyists’ $12 balloon,” The Guardian’s Richard Luscombe reports the following:

    The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade says one of its hobby craft went “missing in action” over Alaska on 11 February, the same day a US F-22 jet downed an unidentified airborne entity not far away above Canada’s Yukon territory.

     

    In a blogpost, the group did not link the two events. But the trajectory of the pico balloon before its last recorded electronic check-in at 12.48am that day suggests a connection – as well as a fiery demise at the hands of a sidewinder missile on the 124th day of its journey, three days before it was set to complete its seventh circumnavigation.

     

    If that is what happened, it would mean the US military expended a missile costing $439,000 (£365,000) to fell an innocuous hobby balloon worth about $12 (£10).

    “The descriptions of all three unidentified objects shot down Feb. 10-12 match the shapes, altitudes and payloads of the small pico balloons, which can usually be purchased for $12-180 each, depending on the type,” writes Steve Trimble for Aviation Week, who first broke the Bottlecap Balloon Brigade story.

    This information would put a bit of a wobble on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s comments to ABC’s This Week on Sunday that all three of the balloons shot down through the weekend were Chinese surveillance devices, saying “the Chinese were humiliated” by the US catching them in their sinister espionage plot. If the US air force did in fact just spent millions of dollars shooting down American party balloons, it wouldn’t be the Chinese who are humiliated.

    And it looks like that is indeed what happened. On Tuesday the National Security Council’s John Kirby said the “leading explanation” for the three unidentified flying objects that were shot down is that they were “balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose.” On Thursday President Biden told the press that “The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation, or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

    And this all comes out after US officials told The Washington Post that the “Chinese spy balloon” which started this historically unprecedented multi-day frenzy of aerial kinetic warfare over North America was probably never intended for surveillance of the United States at all. Experts assess that the balloon was blown over the continent entirely by accident, trying to reconcile that narrative with the contradictory US government claims of intentional Chinese espionage by suggesting that perhaps the Chinese had intended for the balloon to be used for spying on US military forces in the Pacific or something.

    So to recap, the US air force shot down a Chinese balloon which US officials have subsequently admitted was only blown over the US by accident, then went on a spree of shooting things out of the sky which it turns out were probably civilian party balloons. The entire American political/media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more cold war escalations over what is in all probability four harmless balloons.

    And what’s really crazy is that they’re probably going to get those increases in militarism and cold war escalations they’ve been calling for, despite the entire ordeal originating primarily in the overactive imaginations of the drivers of the US empire. The shrieking hysterical panic about “Chinese spy balloons” has dwarfed the coverage of the revelations contradicting that narrative, and China hawks have been using the occasion to argue for increases in military spending. The Atlantic’s Richard Fontaine got all excited and wrote a whole article about how the threat of Chinese spy balloons can be used “to rally public concern and build international solidarity” against China.

    These are the people who rule our world. They are not wise. They are not insightful. They are not even particularly intelligent. The US empire is a Yosemite Sam cartoon character who at any time can just flip out and start firing Sidewinder missiles at random pieces of junk in the sky, screaming “I’ll blast yer head off ya varmint!” If the US war machine was a civilian human, their family would be quietly talking amongst themselves about the possibility of conservatorship.

    These are the last people in the world who should be running things, and they are the last people in the world who should be armed with nuclear weapons. But that’s exactly where we find ourselves in this bizarre slice of spacetime. God help us all.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • You Have To Be Trusted By The People That You Lie To: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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    The widespread refusal to accept that the US government bombed the Nord Stream pipelines is based solely on the faith-based belief that the US government would never do something so evil, despite its having done many things that are far more evil than this right out in the open.

    “Okay sure they’ve been spending the last few years helping Saudi Arabia create mountains of child corpses in Yemen, but blowing up a pipeline? That would be a step too far!”

    So much government nefariousness hides behind the completely unevidenced assumption “Oh, our leaders would never do anything THAT bad!” It’s a belief that is based on literally nothing. It’s believed because it is comfortable.

    ❖

    ❖

    You only get one shot at preventing nuclear war. There will be no do-overs. There will be no course-correction. There will be no learning from mistakes that were made. This is it. Our one and only chance. We’re living it.

    Is it good enough? Are we using our one shot responsibly?

    If the mushroom clouds turn up, will anyone honestly be able to tell themselves that our leaders did everything they could to prevent this from happening, and that we the rank-and-file citizenry did everything we could to pressure them into navigating wisely around this threat?

    I personally don’t think so. I think if we meet our end that way it will be the result of a bunch of humans playing with armageddon weapons in an extremely reckless and irresponsible way with virtually no resistance from the public, because we didn’t like thinking about it much.

    ❖

    The worst thing about Australia is America. All of the most destructive and dangerous things our country has done in recent decades, and all the most destructive and dangerous things it continues to do, have been the result of our role in the US-centralized empire.

    ❖

    Hey I’ve got a smart idea, let’s make laws that require corporations to act like sociopaths, pursuing profit without any consideration for morality or human wellbeing, then let’s allow our entire civilization to be ruled by corporations.

    Oh cool we already did that, good thinking.

    ❖

    The fact that Biden has explicitly said the US will go to war to defend Taiwan, and that it won’t go to war to defend the far less geostrategically crucial Ukraine, should show you that the US does not go to war to defend human interests but to defend its own interests.

    ❖

    ❖

    The biggest problem with the western anti-war movement is that there is no western anti-war movement. All the other problems you think you’re seeing in your “anti-war movement” are at best a very, very distant second to the fundamental problem that your movement has no movement. There’s no good reason to spend your energy worrying if the peace movement is doing it wrong or including the wrong people or not organizing correctly if there is no meaningful peace movement. Focus on fixing that problem first — on creating movement rather than creating inertia and sectarian squabbling.

    ❖

    There’s this Pink Floyd line that’s been rattling around in my head, “You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to.” Because it’s so true; you can’t deceive people who don’t trust you. Propaganda only works if people don’t know it’s happening — if they don’t think of its source as untrustworthy.

    That’s why it gives me hope that trust in the mass media is plunging to historic lows: if people sufficiently distrust those who lie to them, then those lies won’t take root in their minds anymore. Without trust, the propaganda machine can’t function.

    All our world’s troubles are ultimately due to propaganda; people only consent to status quo systems which hurt their interests because their consent is manufactured via propaganda. And that propaganda only works because of public trust in the messengers.

    We can fight this by working to exacerbate public distrust in the institutions that manufacture our consent, spreading public awareness of the fact that everything we’ve been taught to believe about our nation, our government and our world is a lie. All positive changes in human behavior — whether individual or collective — are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Make people more aware that they are being deceived, and the liars will no longer be trusted by the people they lie to.

    Trust in the mass media has never been lower, meanwhile our ability to amplify our own voices and share ideas and information has never been higher. We can use this opportunity to free the collective mind from the chains of propaganda, so that we can finally get real change.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • US Officials Now Say Chinese “Spy Balloon” Flew Over The US Accidentally

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Washington Post has a weird new article out citing multiple anonymous US officials saying that the Chinese “spy balloon” we’ve been hearing about for the last two weeks was never intended for a surveillance mission over North America at all.

    The article is titled “U.S. tracked China spy balloon from launch on Hainan Island along unusual path,” and throughout it alternates between the objective journalistic terms “suspected spy balloon” and “suspected Chinese surveillance balloon” and the US government’s terms “spy balloon” and “airborne surveillance device”. There is at this time no publicly available evidence that the balloon which was famously shot down on February 4th was in fact an instrument of Chinese espionage; the Chinese government has said that the balloon was a civilian meteorological airship that got blown off course, and the Pentagon’s own assessment is that a Chinese spy balloon would not “create significant value added over and above what the PRC is likely able to collect through things like satellites in Low Earth Orbit.”

    What makes the article so weird is that it actually contains claims which substantiate Beijing’s assertion that this was in fact a balloon that got blown off course, yet it keeps repeating the unevidenced claim that it was a “spy balloon”. Here’s an excerpt, emphasis mine:

    By the time a Chinese spy balloon crossed into American airspace late last month, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been tracking it for nearly a week, watching as it lifted off from its home base on Hainan Island near China’s south coast.

     

    U.S. monitors watched as the balloon settled into a flight path that would appear to have taken it over the U.S. territory of Guam. But somewhere along that easterly route, the craft took an unexpected northern turn, according to several U.S. officials, who said that analysts are now examining the possibility that China didn’t intend to penetrate the American heartland with their airborne surveillance device.

     

    The balloon floated over Alaska’s Aleutian Islands thousands of miles away from Guam, then drifted over Canada, where it encountered strong winds that appear to have pushed the balloon south into the continental United States, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.

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    That 1st balloon seemed designed to spy on US assets in Guam, maybe Hawaii — but weather currents sent it way north to Alaska & beyond.

    Rare time when @capitalweather teams up with intel experts @nakashimae @shaneharris for big scoop. https://t.co/qONbIcesUC

    — Paul Kane (@pkcapitol) February 14, 2023

    The article really reads like someone trying to reconcile two contradictory narratives, claiming that although China didn’t intend to send the balloon over the United States, it decided to seize the opportunity to surveil US nuclear sites while it was there anyway.

    “Its crossing into U.S. airspace was a violation of sovereignty and its hovering over sensitive nuclear sites in Montana was no accident, officials said, raising the possibility that even if the balloon were inadvertently blown over the U.S. mainland, Beijing apparently decided to seize the opportunity to try to gather intelligence,” write the article’s authors Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris, and Jason Samenow.

    “Intelligence analysts are unsure whether the apparent deviation was intentional or accidental, but are confident it was intended for surveillance, most likely over U.S. military installations in the Pacific,” they write.

    No mention is made of the two weeks of hysterical shrieking from the western political/media class about China’s outrageously brazen intrusion into US airspace, or the claims from conservative China hawks that it proves Biden has failed to make Beijing sufficiently afraid of American might. No mention is made of the rhetoric from warmongers like House China Select Committee Chairman Mike Gallagher, who claimed the balloon is evidence that China is “a threat to American sovereignty, and it is a threat to the Midwest — in places like those that I live in.” And no mention is made of the White House’s recent admission that the three unidentified objects that US war planes shot down over the weekend were most likely benign balloons.

    “The intelligence community’s considering as a leading explanation that these could just be balloons tied to some commercial or benign purpose,” the National Security Council’s John Kirby told the press on Tuesday.

    So it’s entirely possible that the American political/media class has been spending the month of February furiously demanding more militarism and more cold war escalations over four harmless balloons. It’s entirely possible that the world’s mightiest air force just spent two weeks waging kinetic aerial warfare on random pieces of junk in the sky. And that this is being used to manufacture consent for more aggressions against China.

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    Media 'Spy Balloon' Obsession a Gift to China Hawks https://t.co/dBoTDjBytu

    — Find Us @FAIR at Mastodon.World (@FAIRmediawatch) February 10, 2023

    In a recent article titled “Media ‘Spy Balloon’ Obsession a Gift to China Hawks,” Fair.org’s Julianne Tveten documents the ways the western media have been committing journalistic malpractice with their obedient regurgitation of US government slogans about a “Chinese spy balloon” despite a complete lack of evidence for this claim:

    Despite this uncertainty, US media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon’s conjecture as fact. The New York Times (2/2/23) reported that “the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon,” only to call the device “the spy balloon”—without attributive language—within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC, where the description shifted from “suspected Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23) to simply “Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23). The Guardian once bothered to place “spy balloon” in quotation marks (2/5/23), but soon abandoned that punctuation (2/6/23).

     

    Given that media had no proof of either explanation, it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility—spy balloon vs. weather balloon—equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the US’s official narrative than to that of China.

    And of course getting lost in all this is the obvious fact that it’s no big deal for major governments to spy on each other; they all do so constantly, and the US does it more than anyone else. To suddenly treat increasingly flimsy claims about Chinese spy balloons as some kind of incendiary existential threat is ridiculous.

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    The US shot down the Chinese balloon and other mysterious "objects," claiming that they were a threat to our airspace.

    When Cuba did the same thing in 1962 — and Iran more recently — the US nearly started a war for its right to spy on foreign countries.https://t.co/CTBmzfFNWL

    — Matthew Petti  (@matthew_petti) February 14, 2023

    As commentator Matthew Petti recently observed on Substack, the US has historically been so insistent on its right to fly surveillance aircraft over foreign countries that it has repeatedly come close to war with nations who’ve shot down its spy planes. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, then-attorney general Robert Kennedy issued a red-line threat to the Soviet ambassador that if the Cuban military didn’t stop shooting US spy planes, the United States would launch an invasion of Cuba. Just in 2018 the US came close to the brink of war with Iran when its military shot down a US surveillance drone, and was only averted because Trump was talked out of it by TV pundit Tucker Carlson.

    If the US insists on its right to conduct aerial surveillance on foreign nations, it’s a bit silly for it to throw a tantrum when foreign nations return the favor. It would be even sillier to throw a tantrum over a surveillance mission its own intelligence says was accidental. It would be even sillier for the news media of the western world to assist it in doing so.

    Sometimes I think American media should abandon its whole “free press” charade and just switch to publishing the news straight out of the Pentagon. This is definitely one of those times.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

  • How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine


    Fresh graves at a cemetery near Bakhmut, December 2022. – Photo credit: Reuters

    In a recent column, military analyst William Astore wrote, “[Congressman] George Santos is a symptom of a much larger disease: a lack of honor, a lack of shame, in America. Honor, truth, integrity, simply don’t seem to matter, or matter much, in America today… But how do you have a democracy where there is no truth?”

    Astore went on to compare America’s political and military leaders to the disgraced Congressman Santos. “U.S. military leaders appeared before Congress to testify the Iraq War was being won,” Astore wrote. “They appeared before Congress to testify the Afghan War was being won. They talked of “progress,” of corners being turned, of Iraqi and Afghan forces being successfully trained and ready to assume their duties as U.S. forces withdrew. As events showed, it was all spin. All lies.”

    Now America is at war again, in Ukraine, and the spin continues. This war involves Russia, Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies. No party to this conflict has leveled with its own people to honestly explain what it is fighting for, what it really hopes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it. All sides claim to be fighting for noble causes and insist that it is the other side that refuses to negotiate a peaceful resolution. They are all manipulating and lying, and compliant media (on all sides) trumpet their lies.

    It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth. But spinning and lying has real-world impacts in a war in which hundreds of thousands of real people are fighting and dying, while their homes, on both sides of the front lines, are reduced to rubble by hundreds of thousands of howitzer shells.

    Yves Smith, the editor of Naked Capitalism, explored this insidious linkage between the information war and the real one in an article titled, “What if Russia won the Ukraine War, but the Western press didn’t notice?” He observed that Ukraine’s total dependence on the supply of weapons and money from its Western allies has given a life of its own to a triumphalist narrative that Ukraine is defeating Russia, and will keep scoring victories as long as the West keeps sending it more money and increasingly powerful and deadly weapons.

    But the need to keep recreating the illusion that Ukraine is winning by hyping limited gains on the battlefield has forced Ukraine to keep sacrificing its forces in extremely bloody battles, like its counter-offensive around Kherson and the Russian sieges of Bakhmut and Soledar. Lt. Col. Alexander Vershinin, a retired U.S. tank commander, wrote on Harvard’s Russia Matters website, “In some ways, Ukraine has no choice but to launch attacks no matter the human and material cost.”

    Objective analyses of the war in Ukraine are hard to come by through the thick fog of war propaganda. But we should pay attention when a series of senior Western military leaders, active and retired, make urgent calls for diplomacy to reopen peace negotiations, and warn that prolonging and escalating the war is risking a full-scale war between Russia and the United States that could escalate into nuclear war.

    General Erich Vad, who was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s senior military adviser for seven years, recently spoke to Emma, a German news website. He called the war in Ukraine a “war of attrition,” and compared it to the First World War, and to the Battle of Verdun in particular, in which hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers were killed with no major gain for either side.

    Vad asked the same persistent unanswered question that the New York Times editorial board asked of President Biden last May. What are the U.S. and NATO’s real war aims?

    “Do you want to achieve a willingness to negotiate with the deliveries of the tanks? Do you want to reconquer Donbas or Crimea? Or do you want to defeat Russia completely?” asked General Vad.

    He concluded, “There is no realistic end state definition. And without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism. We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine’s military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life.”

    Whenever Western officials are put on the spot by these unanswered questions, they are forced to reply, as Biden did to the Times eight months ago, that they are sending weapons to help Ukraine defend itself and to put it in a stronger position at the negotiating table. But what would this “stronger position” look like?

    When Ukrainian forces were advancing toward Kherson in November, NATO officials agreed that the fall of Kherson would give Ukraine an opportunity to reopen negotiations from a position of strength. But when Russia withdrew from Kherson, no negotiations ensued, and both sides are now planning new offensives.

    The U.S. media keep repeating the narrative that Russia will never negotiate in good faith, and it has hidden from the public the fruitful negotiations that began soon after the Russian invasion but were quashed by the United States and United Kingdom. Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West “blocked” or “stopped” (depending on the translation) the negotiations.

    Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, “There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker.”

    Advisers to Prime Minister Zelenskyy provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia “should be pressured, not negotiated with.” The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the “collective West,” who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.

    The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister.

    The propaganda frame that Western establishment politicians and media use to explain the war in Ukraine to their own publics is a classic “white hats vs black hats” narrative, in which Russia’s guilt for the invasion doubles as proof of the West’s innocence and righteousness. The growing mountain of evidence that the U.S. and its allies share responsibility for many aspects of this crisis is swept under the proverbial carpet, which looks more and more like The Little Prince’s drawing of a boa constrictor that swallowed an elephant.

    Western media and officials were even more ridiculous when they tried to blame Russia for blowing up its own pipelines, the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines that channeled Russian gas to Germany. According to NATO, the explosions that released half a million tons of methane into the atmosphere were “deliberate, reckless, and irresponsible acts of sabotage.” The Washington Post, in what could be considered journalistic malpractice, quoted an anonymous “senior European environmental official” saying, “No one on the European side of the ocean is thinking this is anything other than Russian sabotage.”

    It took former New York Times investigative reporter Seymour Hersh to break the silence. He published, in a blog post on his own Substack, a spectacular whistleblower’s account of how U.S. Navy divers teamed up with the Norwegian navy to plant the explosives under cover of a NATO naval exercise, and how they were detonated by a sophisticated signal from a buoy dropped by a Norwegian surveillance plane. According to Hersh, President Biden took an active role in the plan, and amended it to include the use of the signaling buoy so that he could personally dictate the precise timing of the operation, three months after the explosives were planted.

    The White House predictably dismissed Hersh’s report as “utterly false and complete fiction”, but has never offered any reasonable explanation for this historic act of environmental terrorism.

    President Eisenhower famously said that only an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

    So what should an alert and knowledgeable American citizenry know about the role our government has played in fomenting the crisis in Ukraine, a role that the corporate media has swept under the rug? That is one of the main questions we have tried to answer in our book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict. The answers include:

    – The U.S. broke its promises not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, before Americans had ever heard of Vladimir Putin, 50 former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academics wrote to President Clinton to oppose NATO expansion, calling it a policy error of “historic proportions.” Elder statesman George Kennan condemned it as “the beginning of a new cold war.”

    – NATO provoked Russia by its open-ended promise to Ukraine in 2008 that it would become a member of NATO. William Burns, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow and is now the CIA Director, warned in a State Department memo, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

    – The U.S.backed a coup in Ukraine in 2014 that installed a government that only half its people recognized as legitimate, causing the disintegration of Ukraine and a civil war that killed 14,000 people.

    – The 2015 Minsk II peace accord achieved a stable ceasefire line and steady reductions in casualties, but Ukraine failed to grant autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk as agreed. Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande now admit that Western leaders only supported Minsk II to buy time for NATO to arm and train Ukraine’s military to recover Donbas by force.

    – During the week before the invasion, OSCE monitors in Donbas documented a huge escalation in explosions around the ceasefire line. Most of the 4,093 explosions in four days were in rebel-held territory, indicating incoming shell-fire by Ukrainian government forces. U.S. and U.K. officials claimed these were “false flag” attacks, as if Donetsk and Luhansk’s forces were shelling themselves, just as they later suggested that Russia blew up its own pipelines.

    – After the invasion, instead of supporting Ukraine’s efforts to make peace, the United States and the United Kingdom blocked or stopped them in their tracks. The U.K.’s Boris Johnson said they saw a chance to “press” Russia and wanted to make the most of it, and U.S. Defense Secretary Austin said their goal was to “weaken” Russia.

    What would an alert and knowledgeable citizenry make of all this? We would clearly condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. But then what? Surely we would also demand that U.S. political and military leaders tell us the truth about this horrific war and our country’s role in it, and demand that the media transmit the truth to the public. An “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.

    The post How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Interference in Canada Far Greater than Alleged Chinese Interference

    The US is a far bigger threat to Canadian sovereignty and democracy than China but you’d never know it from following the dominant media.

    In recent days a CIA-linked firm got the federal government to stop research with a Chinese university, a State Department funded group convinced parliament to criticize China and the Pentagon’s panic over a balloon prompted Global Affairs to summon China’s ambassador. But even media critic Canadaland prefers to focus on Chinese interference in Canada.

    According to “Big Trouble with Meddling China”, a 45-minute Canadaland podcast released last week, “the Chinese state has infiltrated Canadian democracy at all levels, according to a bombshell report from investigative reporter Sam Cooper of Global News.” Three months ago, the author of Wilful Blindness: How a network of narcos, tycoons and CCP agents Infiltrated the West reported on a “vast campaign of foreign interference”. In it, Cooper claimed that Canadian intelligence officials warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that at least 11 candidates running in the 2019 federal election were financed by a clandestine Chinese influence network. But Cooper’s report “is based on unsubstantiated claims and dubious allegations”, noted Brendan Devlin in a convincing Canadian Dimension response headlined “Is China a threat to Canadian democracy?”

    Canadaland’s Jesse Brown is far more trusting of Cooper and his intelligence sources. He doesn’t question Cooper about CSIS’ interest, which is tied to its US counterparts, in hyping the China threat. Instead, the media critic claims Cooper’s reporting hasn’t received adequate attention despite it being at the centre of a major spat between Trudeau and Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20 in November.

    Brown doesn’t even challenge Cooper when he names China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, as well as “allied” countries, interfering in Canadian politics. What kind of journalist names only states that Ottawa considers “enemies”? A mouthpiece of the US Empire aligned intelligence apparatus?

    The ‘China is undermining Canadian democracy story’ line is driven by another country’s far greater influence, which the media largely ignores. Atop its front-page last week, the Globe and Mail published “Canadian universities conducting joint research with Chinese military scientists” and then two days later “Ottawa vows to curb Canadian university research with Chinese military scientists”. The source for the Globe’s expose about scientists tied to China’s National University of Defence Technology was Strider Technologies. The Salt Lake City based firm is full of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials, including Assistant Director John Mullen. The Globe failed to mention this fact.

    Last Thursday the House of Commons unanimously endorsed a resolution reiterating its claim that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang and calling for Canada to accept 10,000 Uyghur refugees. Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi, working closely with the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, drove the initiative. The group’s website stated the “Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacy work in Canada.” The media ignores how the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the US government’s NED and that it openly seeks to balkanize China, rejecting the legitimacy of the nationalist/communist revolution that united China after more than a century of foreign domination.

    Last week the US military convinced Canadian officials to hype a large balloon that apparently passed through Canadian airspace at the end of January. Global Affairs summoned the Chinese ambassador in Ottawa and Melanie Joly said the federal government would “take all necessary measures to safeguard Canada’s sensitive information”. Subsequently, Ottawa has joined Washington in supporting shooting down three more unidentified objects that many are suggesting are Chinese.

    Two months ago, the Liberals released an Indo-Pacific Strategy that labeled China “an increasingly disruptive global power” engaged in “foreign interference and increasingly coercive treatment of other countries.” US ambassador David Cohen pushed for the strategy and immediately applauded its release.

    Anti-China hysteria is sweeping through US public life. Its air force recently scuttled a plan for a corn mill in North Dakota claiming the Chinese firm’s investment represented a “significant threat” while Texas and other states are looking at banning people from China from buying land, homes or other buildings. Many US states have banned TikTok from public Wi-Fi networks, including at universities, and there’s talk of shuttering the Chinese-owned social media platform out right.

    Washington is waging an economic war on China. The US has launched an unprecedented international campaign to block China’s access to advanced semiconductor chips.

    Last week four-star Air Force General Mike Minihan, head of US Air Mobility Command, told his troops that the economic war is likely to turn into a shooting conflict by 2025. Minihan wrote that they should prepare for war with China, which will likely centre on Taiwan. In the recently signed budget the US allocated $10 billion over five years in arms to Taiwan, which most of the world considers a province of China. Hundreds of US troops are also stationed on the island.

    Last week the US signed an agreement with the Philippines to use more bases. In “US secures deal on Philippines bases to complete arc around China” the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reported, “the US has secured access to four additional military bases in the Philippines – a key bit of real estate which would offer a front seat to monitor the Chinese in the South China Sea and around Taiwan. With the deal, Washington has stitched the gap in the arc of US alliances stretching from South Korea and Japan in the north to Australia in the south. The missing link had been the Philippines, which borders two of the biggest potential flashpoints — Taiwan and the South China Sea.”

    For its part, CNN reported last week on “plans to deploy new US Marine units to Japanese islands. The US Marine Corps also opened a new base on Guam last week, a strategically important US island east of the Philippines.”

    The US already has over 100,000 troops stationed around China. Washington spends $2,400 a year per citizen on its military whereas Beijing spends $200 for each Chinese citizen. The US also spends twice as a much on militarism as a percent of its GDP.

    Recently US ally Japan announced a plan to spend $320 billion US on its military over the next five years. Japan plans to acquire missiles that can strike China and its new National Security Strategy labels that country its “greatest strategic challenge ever”.

    The US Empire is taking an ever more aggressive posture towards China and Washington is demanding Canada’s support, which Ottawa is increasingly giving.

    Complaining about alleged Chinese influence on Canadian democracy without mentioning the far greater US influence is like calling the police on a shoplifter while a bull rampages in your porcelain shop.

    The post US Interference in Canada Far Greater than Alleged Chinese Interference first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What’s It All About, Alfie?

    Set in postwar London, Alfie features Michael Caine as a chauffeur bent on promiscuity. After impregnating his girlfriend he takes off on vacation. He continues his life of womanizing, but he can’t hide forever. A misfortune strikes and Alfie is forced to face the product of his ways.

    This not the crux of the question, since I was a monogamous dater and monogamous husband. It’s more centered around the discordance and dissheveled nature of humanity in the Western world, which unfortunately is the litmus test for much of the world now, which is another conundrum for me: why the hell would Japan or Oaxaca or Istanbul give a shit about McDonalds, Disneyland, Top Gun and disposable diapers? How viral is Western consumerism and retail disease? How diseased are the people of the world to buy into a disposable culture, from the ketchup containers to the children to the old people?

    Marketing, man, and that is a very sophisticated psychological end game. The end run around is the pervasive marketing of everything, and the fake quality of modern humans. All about selling or acting or putting on a show.

    Yeah, I’m writing this on the heels of yet another attempt to have a job tied to some civil and social justice gig. I got the call for a 15 minute interview Tuesday, with the fair housing coalition of Oregon, working in four rural counties as an outreach-educator specialist, getting stakeholders (I despise that term) to get around a table, or in a room or on Zoom to understand the rights of renters, tenants, and home buyers.

    Up my alley, and alas, I have worked around the housing “issue” for several decades, as an urban and regional planning grad student, and then with clients in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, Vancouver, and on the Oregon Coast.

    Two people interviewed me, and one big question was what I thought of how poverty has come about. Oh how it all ties into Capitalism, about the Gilded Age, about the first Anglo Saxons coming to this “New World” and exploiting the Original peoples. Exploiting as in murdering. Stealing land. Polluting the land. Moving them off the land. Re-educating them. Turning the real people into savages. Enslavement and denigration. Haves and haves not. You know, workers, laborers, even the professional managerial class, at the whim of the One Percent and the Five percent. You need poor people to make a buck, and you need poverty to be rich. You know, toil and labor to make the gilded ones money.

    But it is deeper, sort of like economic sanctions on countries like Cuba or Venezuela — sanctions against the majority of people in Capitalism to pay the fines, fees, tolls, poll taxes, taxes, add-ons, service fees, tickets, violations, late charges, penalties, and the mortgages.

    All those millions working hard to stay afloat, and then some medical emergency, some run-in with a lawyer or insurance company or the law, and bam, the semi-stable household is put into a spin — economic, spiritual and existential spin.

    There will always be a PayDay monster lurking in Capitalism. There will always be scammers and legions of thieves who get away with it in CAPITALISM. Poverty makes millions of people money — cops/pigs, courts, judges, schools, governmental program managers, workers in all those so called welfare divisions. You get it! Take a child out of a home, and you will find dozens of workers and managers managing that Child Protective Services intervention-destruction.

    In any case, I got a second interview, this time in front of seven people and with an hour to dog and pony my self into their midst. Provide a seven minute Zoom teaching modality or Power Point. Also tell us what a strategy would be to undertake an outreach program in Clatsopo, Tillamook, Lincoln and Columbia Counties. One educator and outreach honcho, and what would you do and who would you engage to get this off the ground?

    One hour equalled five hours or more of prep. I actually called county commissioners in two of the counties. I did much research on all the places that might be engaged with low income folk or people of color. The obvious thing is to get into the faith communities, with support services like work source and Department of Human services departments, and even school districts and landlord groups.

    Here, what I was being asked to get ready for:

    Here are some details about the interview.

    • It will be about an hour long. The whole team will be there.
    • One question for you to prepare in advance: Talk about how you would conduct an outreach campaign to raise awareness of fair housing in rural Columbia, Clatsop, Tillamook and Lincoln Counties. Who do you think would be most important to reach and what would your strategies be for reaching them?
    • At the end of the interview, we will ask you to conduct a seven-minute training on any topic you like. We want to see what your facilitation style is like. We will make you a cohost on Zoom so if you have a PowerPoint to share, you can.

    I talked to one woman originally from Michigan who was a county commissioner in Clatsop County. She had spent much time in Portland, and she told me that she had experienced living in Lansing, Michigan as a white woman who witnessed redlining and major discrimination against Black Americans in their attempt to get affordable housing.

    She had that poster of Che on her wall.

    At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

    ― Ernesto “Che” Guevara (“Venceremos: Speeches and Selected Writings of Che Guevara.”)

    She gave me great insight into her county, and how the rural-urban divide has a crass and prejudice guiding mark — “These trust fund babies or super rich come into our Oregon Coast Communities and think that the IQ for our rural residents is 30 points lower than from their urban locales. Everyone comes here to be served and waited on, even for a couple of days. Everyone, even the struggling middle class, want that two or three days of pretending to be like the rich — fancy food, big hotel, and loads of beach fun and trinket buying.”

    I even talked to the president of the Landords Assocation, and I interviewed another commissioner, with the eye toward their opinion on how an outreach campaign might work in their respective communities — counties with 27K, 50K, and 42K populations. Rich homes, arts, retired, and then the linen changers, the cooks, the medical technicians, the teachers, you know, coffee shop workers, bussers, cooks, even the simple laborers to keep those amenities and Martha Stewart homes, kitchens and decks prettified.

    The lack of housing is huge, and affordable housing is few and far between. Of course I am a socialist, and these systems of oppression and exploitation have to go. Homes and apartments and mixed neighborhoods have to be run by us, the people, the new American government, and, sure a few can get in on building and designing, but there should never be a society where rents are artificial for investment and profits. A one bedroom apartment for how much in Seattle, Chicago, here? And what are those wages of the linen changers and hotel cleaners?

    It will take so many tens of millions to strike against this super exploitative system, and we need a public commons, public utilities, public health, education and transportation. Housing has to be part of that, not some bogus HUD lie, which is predicated on which insane political party is in office. Safe, affordable housing. That human right!

    Fact: In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), recognizing adequate housing as a component of the human right to an adequate standard of living.

    • All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
    • Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
    • Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
    • No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
    • No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
    • Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
    • All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination. (source)

    Oh, well, that job went the way of the Dodo, as many of my job applicatons have: “Hi Paul, Thank you so much for your time and energy today in the interview and the obvious passion you have towards social justice. We didn’t feel that you were the right fit for this position at this time and we are going to continue our search. Again, thank you for your time and energy. Sincerely, S…!”

    There are those buzzwords — “energy” and “passion” and” social justice.” AND, “not the right fit.” I will not get into the errors of their ways, or the dynamics of being age 66 and being interviewed by all women except one, but all in 30 something age range, two hitting forty something. Spilt milk? Sour grapes? Come on, that missive-whatever-rejection-note tells me shit about the interview, what was missing, what I did right, about anything, really. Me thinks there is prejudice here, including age, gender and alas my white skin discrimination. I’m a communist, which I did not disclose, but certainly they might have Googled me, and then, you get the semi-half picture of me (right … little of what I write or how I express myself gives anyone doing a cursory search of men much to know about me — the real me).

    Oh well, another interview bites the dust, another quippy essay in the can.

    Note: For a Continuation of this diatribe around bandwagons and following the sheeple, go to Dissident Voice, “Let the Bandwagon Play On!”

    The post What’s It All About, Alfie? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pentagon Wants To Return Special Ops Propagandists To Ukraine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    An article by The Washington Post titled “Pentagon looks to restart top-secret programs in Ukraine” contains some interesting information about what US special ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future. 

    “The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top-secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia’s invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials,” writes the Post’s Wesley Morgan. “If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation.”

    Much further down in the article we learn the specifics of what those two top-secret programs were. One of them entailed US commandos sending Ukrainian operatives “on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine’s east” to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course The Washington Post does not describe it as such.

    “We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs,” WaPo was told by a source described as “a person in the Special Operations community.”

    US special ops forces “employing Ukrainian operatives” to “take apart Russian propaganda” and “tell the true story on blogs” is just US special ops forces administering US propaganda online. Whether or not they actually see themselves as “telling the true story” or “taking apart Russian propaganda” does not change the fact that they are administering US government propaganda. A government circulating media which advances its information interests is precisely the thing that state propaganda is.

    The US government is theoretically prohibited from directly administering propaganda to its own population (though even that line has been deliberately eroded in recent years with measures like the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act and US government infiltration of the mass media and Silicon Valley), but there’s nothing stopping the funding and directing of foreign bodies to circulate propaganda on the internet, which has no national borders. Back when US propaganda was limited to old media like the CIA’s Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia it was possible to claim that the propaganda was solely being targeted at the populations where that media was broadcast, but propaganda circulated online will necessarily trickle over everywhere, including to US audiences.

    The Washington Post explains that these secret programs were discontinued ahead of the Russian invasion last year because a stipulation in the 2018 NDAA law which permitted their funding forbids their use during a “traditional armed conflict,” so the Pentagon is working to persuade congress to repeal that condition. Part of its sales pitch to congress to get these secret operations restarted is that they will be “what the U.S. military calls ‘non-kinetic’ — or nonviolent — missions,” which the administering of propaganda would certainly qualify as.

    As we discussed recently, it’s very silly that there’s a major push in the US power alliance to begin administering more government propaganda in order to “counter Russian propaganda” when Russian propaganda has no meaningful influence in the western world. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

    In reality, this push we’ve been seeing to pour more and more energy into propaganda, censorship, and other forms of narrative control has nothing to do with “taking apart Russian propaganda” and everything to do with suppressing dissent. The US empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because the “great power competition” it has been preparing against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation. Nobody’s going to consent to being made poorer, colder, and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn’t benefit them unless that consent is actively manufactured.

    That’s why the media have been acting so weird lately, that’s why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online, that’s the purpose of the new “fact-checking” industry and other forms of narrative control, and that’s why the Pentagon wants congressional funding for its propaganda operations in Ukraine. The fact that the empire’s “great power competition” happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure its information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda. The more desperate our rulers grow to secure unipolar planetary domination, the more important controlling the narrative becomes.

    ___________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

    Orientation

    Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article

    Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of propaganda by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Because this article is rhetoric and not propaganda, I will take my chances, identifying thirteen commandments of propaganda.

    In my last article, Speaking with Forked Tongues, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behavior while censoring, hiding, restricting distorting and exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks.

    A little less than two years ago I wrote an article called Jacques Ellul: Controversies in Propaganda. The purpose of this article is to explicate the theory of propaganda of Brian Anse Patrick in The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. Secondly and briefly, it will be to compare his theory to that of Ellul.

    Most Provocative Points of Ellul’s Propaganda Theory

    • Unlike other theorists, Ellul argued that propaganda served boththe upper classes and the lower classes for different reasons.
    • Unlike other theorists, he understood propaganda as inevitable in modern societies. There is no getting around this.
    • Unlike most other theorists, he saw masses of people as complicit in their own subordination. He saw them neither as victims of circumstance nor as heroic masses.
    • He distinguished between hard and fast political propagandaand soft and slow sociological  He called political propaganda “agitation”. Education is not outside propaganda. It is part of sociological propaganda.
    • He identified two techniques of propagandizing the masses. The first kind is mithridatizationwhich acts like a sedative and sensibilization which is about riling people up.
    • Unlike most other theorists of propaganda, Ellul followed Joseph Goebbels and said that the best propaganda is based on facts.It becomes propaganda with the interpretation of facts. Propaganda based on lies is a sign of weakness.
    • Most propaganda theorists thought the working class was most impacted by propaganda. Ellul argued that it is the upper-middle classes that create the propaganda and are most likely to believe it.
    • Ellul distinguished horizontal propaganda,which was made inside the group, from vertical propaganda, which uses centralized power. An example of horizontal propaganda was the re-educational groups of Yankee soldiers organized by the Chinese communists during Yankee imprisonment.
    • For Ellul, propaganda does not come from the ruling class, but from the upper-middle class.
    • Industrialist capitalist “democracies” need propagandabecause they depend on public opinion, which is disorganized. It requires propaganda to compete with socialist societies.
    • Unlike other theorists, Ellul makes a distinction between ideology and myth and argues that myth is more powerful.
    • His concept of crystallization claims that the individual has latent drives and stereotypes which are vague (based on the work of Karen Horney), and they then become the foundation of propaganda.
    • Unlike other schools of propaganda, Ellul argues that quantitative study of propaganda isn’t effective. One cannot tell how many people are reached and how effective white vs black propaganda is. At what point do you say it failed? At what point does the payoff justify the cost?
    • According to Ellul, psychological propaganda in foreign countries does not work. Propagandists are too ignorant of the attitudes, centers of interest, presuppositions and suspicions of the foreign population.

    Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

    1. Control the information flow by becoming a source or distributor of information

    This includes creating news events, press releases, town hall meetings, scientific reports, op-ed pieces, direct mail appeals, talk show appearances, books, think tanks and commissions. It means creating novelties and hiring screen writers for movies. Many ideas are testing out the public by creating focus groups to see how people respond. This was shown in Parts I and II of Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self. Another technique was in the creating of Gallup polls which surveyed the opinions of Mordor’s citizens about sociological and political hot topics to see what floats and what doesn’t.

    1. Use black and white absolutes

    This was included in my previous article Speaking in Tongues in that it used loaded language, specifically virtue and vice words. Propaganda does not seem to work well when there seem to exist only many shades of gray. It is successful when it paints in broad, bold brushstrokes complicated social reality into a melodramatic, dichotomous struggle between good guys and bad guys. Nazi’s terms such as Jewish “bacillus” (parasites) to define the Jews helped the extermination process. Once the Jews were officially defined as the “parasitic nation of Judea” it became easier to do horrible things to them. The same is true with what was done to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. Conspiracy theories are perfect frameworks for black and white thinking.

    Expect that as Mordor revs up its propaganda machine against China, Chinese images will appear, just like the image at the beginning of this article. Here the Chinese are wallowing in opium dens making them seem like a decadent culture. What is absent from the propaganda poster is the story of how the British brought opium to China to begin with.

    1. Crafting the message so it resonates with what is already in people’s heads in terms of their values and beliefs

    One of the two most common misunderstandings about propaganda is that propagandists want to introduce something new. Propagandists cannot afford to risk time, effort and resources on messages that might not fly. They need to work with the beliefs and commitments that people already have and just interpret the meaning differently. All a propagandist has to do to create negative propaganda is use propaganda which violates these values in order to drum up hostility among the natives against their supposed enemy. In psychological warfare, predictably, the CIA trots out its tired old list of atrocity stories of the enemy – eating babies, various betrayals to family and any of the violations of evolutionary psychology to work people up into supporting the latest war.

    Neither is it true that propaganda is filled with lies. It is true that black propaganda does this, but the use of black propaganda is a sign that propaganda’s messages come out of weakness rather than strength. Following Goebbels, Patrick says propaganda must be factual. It in the interpretation of the facts that propaganda makes its move. In addition to facts, there must be something inexorable about the interpretation as if it could not be any other way. It also must seem necessary, as if any other interpretation would lead to a disaster. Finally, the message must seem to have legitimacy, with the weight of the authorities and the ages behind it.

    1. Address psychological, spiritual and social needs of the population

    Over two thousand years ago Patrick points out, Aristotle identified what made people happy. He included security, the independent enjoyment of goods, health, wealth, friendship, good children, good birth and pleasant old age. Patrick says these are the same values American politicians draw from. The differences between people in different cultures is the order of these values, not the values themselves. In addition, what is important to people will draw their attention. Lastly, the biological need for food, sex and economic survival is sure to draw people out.

    Today Patrick says modern mass society the media person is a strange hybrid of neurotic insecurity and solipsistic egomania. A mass individual is socialized to think himself unique and inviolable in his opinion and in his voting. Propaganda must appeal to this.

    Propaganda must appeal to the individual’s identity, his ego, his power and his efficacy. The person must feel like he belongs somewhere, that he is wanted and useful. Lastly, propaganda must give the individual a sense of understanding the world, where it is going along with addressing the political anxiety that develops because of an absence of reassurance about direction. It also helps for the propaganda to have the appearance of hidden underground knowledge that is revealed only to superior beings.

    1. Censoring stories or contrary information

    Even if you control the content and sources of information, even if you hammer your message into dualistic opposites and even if you appeal to the beliefs and values of the audience, the message of propaganda will be weakened if the beliefs, values, movements, parties and programs of its opposition are allowed to be aired publicly. Propaganda must actively suppress its opposition. Patrick’s most blatant example of this is Britain’s cutting the transatlantic cable from Germany during the World War I. A weaker version of this is to make sure that stories that run against propaganda never get to the public through the press. For over two decades an organization called Project Censored comes out with a book which, among other things, contains 25 of the top censored stories every year. In the 2022 edition, here are some of the stories:

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

    Many, many people imagine propaganda works like the spokes of a wheel. In the center is the propagandist sending out information to separate the spokes. The relationship between the spokes has nothing to do with propaganda. But Patrick rightly claims horizontal propaganda (relationships between groups) is perhaps the most effective way yet of sustaining a propaganda message. It extends, supplements and complements centralized, authoritative bureaucratic propaganda. In the case of the Milgram experiment, the “teachers” obeyed the authorities not just because the authorities seemed legitimate, but because other members of the group were also shocking people. Maoist Chinese communists relied on hammering their propaganda in a centralized way. But they also wisely held writing contests for groups in which the winner of the essay would be the one that most successfully denounced US imperialism. These essays were then discussed in a groupsetting where the content of the essays reinforced the propaganda of the communists. In a text I used to use in teaching my Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric class, the author pointed out that when Yankee soldiers were asked why they stuck out horrendous situations, it wasn’t because of obedience to their officers and the propaganda of patriotism. It was because they didn’t want to let their comrades down.

    In cults, the central propaganda comes from the cult leader. But the cult leader by themselves is not strong enough to break the bond between the recruit and their family and friends. However, the propaganda is sustained by fellow cult members, especially when they are living together. The pressure of horizontal propaganda has often been strong enough to break the loyalty of the recruit to their own family. This is why families hire cult counselors to intervene to get their children out of the cult.

    A less heavy-headed approach can be seen in AA groups. The centralized propaganda of Alcoholics Anonymous are the twelve steps. But when a person declares that they are ready to graduate from AA, even the best sponsor will not be as successful in pressuring the person leaving to stay as much as having to face the group at one of their meetings. Similar processes are in place in the horizontal sustaining of propaganda in DARE and in Amway groups.

    When propagandists bombard a mass population, they never know how it will be perceived. There will always be people who are apathetic, recalcitrant or openly rebellious and are invisible to the vertical propagandists. However, once propaganda becomes horizontalized, groups have a far better record of winning the recruit to their side and for marginalizing or driving out deviants.

    Propagandists also have ways of controlling groups by spouting an ideology that seems to be the opposite of the propagandists’ attempts at control. Some of these include “Team” management; “Democratization” of the workplace; “quality” circles; “shared” governance. Once groups have begun implementing the ideology, it only becomes stronger and more difficult for people to recognize that team management hides the old authority; that democracy in the workplace is still controlled by managers; quality circles rarely result in higher pay for workers and shared governance still has the same bosses at the top. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

    1. Cognitively penetrate and stick

    How does the propagandist get attention in an age of attention deficit? How do they sustain the attention once it has been noticed? Two means of being noticed are novelty and humor. In the case of humor, from what I am told, there are an extraordinary number commercials during the Superbowl which are dominated by humor. A person is more likely to remember a brand when a commercial made them laugh.

    In order to sustain a person’s attention, the propagandist has to compete with many other propagandists from the fields of advertising, politics, economics and sports. An essential strategy is to burrow a hole into the consciousness by repeatingthe message. In addition, these messages must be simple and easy to understand, filled with slogans and with accompanying images. Popular music is a great example. I still remember the lyrics of rock and roll songs from 50 years ago because the verses were repeated, the music was simple (think of Motown) and there were the accompanying images of the musicians. For two thousand years the discipline of rhetoric has studied the ways in which people can have their minds and actions changed. Rhetorical devices – metaphors, acronyms, alliteration, and  rhyme – make language memorable, dramatic and visual.

    1. Personalize events

    Many years ago, I  worked as a counselor for an organization called Men Overcoming Violence. It was a 40-week program for men who were violent with their partners. Our job was to teach them better communication skills. Periodically we would hire outside speakers to give talks for the public that was related to our work. One time we had two presenters, each taking the opposite stance about the extent that violence was inevitable in men. The first presenter approached the problem statistically. He presented research from Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He also presented cross-cultural research claiming that men were nine times more likely to be violent than women. The second presenter took the case study approach. They brought up a man who had successfully graduated from our program. He told the audience the story of how he was once violent with his wife, but thanks to our program he had changed. Then he called on the man’s wife who testified about how much he had changed. There was not a dry eye in the house. After the two talks we asked the audience via secret ballot whether they thought men could ever be no more violent than woman. Guess who won? The personal story won out over the statistics.

    When we hear of mass shootings in the news are we presented with statistics on how many the police have killed in the course of the year? No. We are presented with the personal stories of either the victim or the slayer. Patrick points out that when a lawyer defends a multiple slayer to the jury, he is likely to lead with “my client made a mistake”. Everyone makes mistakes, right? It could have been you. Switching to cinema, whatever the movie you’re watching, you can be sure part of the trailer line will be “one man’s quest…to overcome adversity”. Heroes and villains – not sociology – dominate the popular imagination. What propagandists fear most is masses of people responding against the propagandists in a collective manner. In making the problem personal and psychological, collective responses are less likely.

    1. Bureaucratize events

    The flip side of personalizing events is to bureaucratize them, that is to convey the message that there is nothing that can be done to combat the propaganda. It removes the question of responsibility. To speak in a bureaucratic passive voice depersonalizes decisions which are ugly, stupid and arbitrary. Political scientist Edelman says the main function of modern mass political language is to sharpen the pointless to show some interest and blunt the too sharply pointed.

    In their book Bureaucratic Propaganda, David Altheide and John Johnson say that bureaucratic propaganda is used in how newsrooms use records; how tv ratings are constructed and interpreted and how religious movements count souls. Bureaucratic propaganda also includes keeping a transmission of records about what an organization does, how the police magnify or minimize its reports and how the military counts its casualties. Patrick points out:

    Military censors or media relations personnel avoid news images that show the caskets for the people on their side of the conflict, especially in quantity. In the first World War, despite nearly a million United Kingdom military dead, no British newspaper reputedly even showed a photography of a dead British soldier. Seeing actual bodies shocks and reduces morale. (148)

    In the political context, with competition for scarce funds, prestige and continued political support make records creation a self-serving activity. The capitalist state fudges rate of unemployment, the gross national product, the rate of inflation and the number of Covid cases to reassure the public that it has everything under control.

    With bureaucratic propaganda the public gets what Goffman called the “front” part of the organization and never the back side. Unlike traditional propaganda, bureaucratic propaganda does not try to reinforce deeply held beliefs, but instead the legitimacy of an existing organization through painting a contrived, managed and decontextualized picture. The appeal of bureaucratic propaganda is not to economic, political or advertising forces, but to the scientific validity, rationality and objectivity of an organization which will hopefully not be investigated. Officials are encouraged along with their subordinates to use two or more sets of records. One for the inspection of other officials and organizations and one for the privacy of insiders only.

    At the same time, bureaucratic propaganda can be used for political purposes while hiding under the cloak of dispensing information.

    In its nearly half century of official existence, the US Information Agency employed several thousand persons, mainly for “informing people” in foreign countries (especially the Soviet bloc) via news, education and entertainment broadcasts. (175)

    Op-ed pieces are another way of introducing scientific sub-propaganda to an unaware public. Gallup polls supposedly do a “need assessment” for social services or political programs and lo and behind, the bureaucratic organization is found to support public needs. On the other hand, if a research proposal contradicts the purpose of the bureaucratic organization it is not favorably reviewed or funded.

    Why people accept bureaucratic propaganda is partly because of the reasons Weber gave in his description of a bureaucracy. There are rational rules which govern an office (not capacious); people compete for their roles (vs nepotism) and are trained in the roles they play. They receive a regular salary and work is supervised. There are records kept of their work.

    1. Demonstrate good ethics

    Patrick points out that in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, ethos was the most important element in persuasion. Though propaganda is different than rhetoric in many ways, including that it is impersonal, mass produced and standardized, it is still worth keeping in mind. One of the myths of propaganda is that it does not try to be moral. On the contrary, there is a need for conspicuous displays of ethics and morals in propaganda. One instance of political propaganda is Kipling’s justification for British colonialism as “The White Man’s Burden”.

    Patrick points out that a triumph of British and American propaganda during the 20th century was the successful attachment during both World Wars to the label of propaganda solely to Germans. For many, propaganda is associated forever with Joseph Goebbels. When one says propaganda people quickly think of jackboots and swastikas, but these are a direct result of Anglo-American propaganda. Later on, the same thing was done to the Soviet Union and Japan.

    The truth was that it was British and Americans who were best at propaganda. It was Bernays who first called propaganda by its real name. He then wisely switched it to “public relations” when he realized propaganda had some nasty political implications which would expose what he was actually doing. Americans disguised their propaganda efforts under euphemistic organizations such as the Committee of Public Information in World War I.  In World War II there was TheOffice of Wartime Information.

    Good ethics in propaganda means keeping control at all times and showing poise in difficult circumstances. Losing control in public with displays of anger show there might be conflicts between elites or a lack of confidence in propaganda. Secondly, propagandists want to appear as moderates, not as “extremists”. Third, propagandists must be dressed in a respectable manner, be in good shape physically and attractive. Further, other signs  of good ethics is that people are open and capable of handling disagreement. Being closed and defensive draws suspicion. Lastly, propagandists should have ethical codes of conduct, mission and vision statements which elevate propagandistic activities to the level of the broader social services.

    1. Dispense selective interpretation of facts

    As much as possible propagandists start with facts. What they do then is interpret the facts in a particular way. What the propagandist doesn’t tell you is that there may be four or five other ways of interpreting the facts and connecting the dots that are suppressed. For example, a Freudian propagandist may tell an audience at a psychoanalytic conference that depression is repressed anger. A graduate student may be very impressed. But what the Freudian propagandist will not discuss is that there are cognitive, behavioral, physiological theories of depression as well, and some of the better follow-up results than Freudians.

    1. Distance the propaganda from its source by using front groups like foundations, think tanks, and research patronage

    Propagandists rarely go to the public directly. They mediate their message through intermediate organizations such as universities, foundations, think tanks, policydiscussion group, and other organizations I’ll discuss shortly. This gives the propagandist credibility – or the benefit of the doubt that goes with organizations that appear to be just disinterested third parties.

    Political sociologist G. William Domhoff in his great book The Powers That Be, lays out a political funnel through which propaganda is disseminated. He starts out by saying the three most powerful economic organizations in Mordor are the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Round Table. It is through these three organizations that all conservative and liberal propaganda is spun. The first level of dissemination is through the board of trustees of universities and through grants that come from foundations. These organizations then set up think tanks. Centrist think tanks are the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute. There are lots of right-wing think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute; the Heritage Foundation; the Cato Institute; The Center for Strategic and International Studies; the Hoover Institute and the Manhattan Project.

    The only liberal Think Tank is the Ford Foundation. Johnny-come-lately social democratic think tanks are the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

    The third level down are policy discussion groups from which testimonies, reports, books and editorials flow. The fourth level is the result of these policy discussion groups that go through mass media newscasts along with the Chambers of Commerce.

    All these filters peddle the same conservative-liberal propagandistic line. Willingness to toe the line determines which political candidates are chosen from either party.

    The Republicans and Democrats reproduce the same frameworks that were built at the university and foundation level. It doesn’t matter whether these candidates understand upper levels or not. In fact, it is more convincing if they don’t understand what they are doing because it appears that they are making up their own minds in what they say.

    1. Accommodate informational needs and habits of professionals

    Aiming propaganda at a mass audience is often wastefully ineffective.  It is a shotgun approach because the cynical Patrick says the masses are more likely to be apathetic and inattentive to anything other than sex and food. As Jacques Ellul has revealed, it is not the ruling class that creates propaganda. It is the upper-middle classes that are the explainers of capitalism to the rest of the population. That means that propagandists have to create, package and distributute propaganda in ways that suit the informational requirements and professional routines of journalists, editors, script writers, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade associations, blogs,  and news media.

    For the past 100 years since the development of modern mass media, propagandists have provided pre-written news articles for use of journalists known as “press releases which benefit media organizations because fewer journalists are needed to process stories. (123)

    Most quotes from officials found in press releases are simply made up by the propagandists who write the releases. (124)

    What Would Jacques Ellul Say?

    Personalizing events

    One of the things that would have surprised Ellul is the power that personalization has in moving people. France is less individualistic than Mordor’s ideology  and people living in Mordor have become more individualistic in the past sixty years since Ellul wrote his book.

    Propaganda in black and white

    Ellul was more interested in the subtleties of propaganda. While he did make a distinction between propaganda designed to rile people up (which he called sensibilization) and to cool people out (which he called mithridatization), he was more interested in propaganda that pacified people.

    Horizontal propaganda

    Ellul did have room for horizontal propaganda in his system but he might have been surprised by the extent it has been developed in adding members of cults and AAA to the mix.

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

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • My Sources Corroborate Sy Hersh’s Nord Stream Report: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    My sources corroborate Seymour Hersh’s report that the US was behind the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. (My sources are logic, common sense, and public statements by US government officials.)

    If Putin and senior Russian officials had said what Biden and senior US officials have been saying about how much they hate the Nord Stream pipelines and how great it is that they were bombed, every member of the western political/media class would blame Russia for the bombing, and we would never hear the end of it.

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    FLASHBACK: BIDEN:“If Russia invades — that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine — then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it”

    REPORTER: “How will you do that?”

    BIDEN: “I promise you, we'll be able to do it.”pic.twitter.com/XGmFV4c9Qm

    — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 9, 2023

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    According to @SecBlinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come." Too bad that this tremendous opportunity for DC bureaucrats will come at the expense of everyone else, especially this coming winter. pic.twitter.com/T2eacQUuBF

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 1, 2022

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    At a Senate hearing, top US diplomat Victoria Nuland celebrated the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:

    "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea." pic.twitter.com/KS5OM4N165

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) January 27, 2023

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    Pompeo says US will 'do everything' to stop Nord Stream 2 project https://t.co/gnARiIAUhi pic.twitter.com/VZg6HIWrFM

    — American Military News (@AmerMilNews) August 1, 2020

    Russia would stand nothing to gain by bombing its own pipeline whose gas flow it could control on its own end, while US officials are openly acknowledging that the US benefits from it directly. It’s just so silly how imperial spinmeisters are falling all over themselves to dismiss a claim they all privately know is true because it’s so glaringly obvious.

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    In this video I discuss Seymour Hersh's bombshell report that the US blew up Nord Stream

    I also look at other evidence he didn't mention

    Norway & Poland opened their own Baltic pipeline hours after the sabotage

    US is now the world's largest LNG exporterhttps://t.co/8RCoWWwXni

    — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 9, 2023

    The Nord Stream sabotage is like what 9/11 would look like if before 9/11 you had top US officials saying “Yeah we’re definitely going to bring an end to the World Trade Center” and then after 9/11 they were saying “It’s good that the World Trade Center was destroyed because it advances our interests.” The compilations of evidence we’ve been seeing that the US was behind this attack look a lot like the evidence compiled by 9/11 conspiracy analysts, except the evidence is way stronger and US officials are pretty much saying they did it in plain English.

    It’s just a basic fact that conspiracies happen. Powerful people do conspire with each other, and they are often able to keep their conspiring secret for a very long time. It really is a cruel joke how our rulers hide their actions behind thick veils of government secrecy, punish anyone who tries to look behind those veils with harsh prison sentences, and then have the gall to smear those who try to form theories about what they’re doing behind those veils as “conspiracy theorists”.

    Just something to keep in mind as the mad narrative management scramble to brand Sy Hersh a “conspiracy theorist” continues.

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    Love how Reuters calls it a "blog post" to imply that Sy fucking Hersh is just some rando with a Tumblr account. pic.twitter.com/1BIu0Y1ysw

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 8, 2023

    ❖

    The empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because its “great power competition” against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation.

    Economic warfare, exploded military spending and nuclear brinkmanship all harm/threaten the interests of the rank-and-file public. Nobody’s going to consent to being made poorer and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn’t benefit them without being manipulated to.

    That’s why the media have been acting so weird lately, that’s why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online, and that’s the purpose of the new “fact-checking” industry and other forms of narrative control. Controlling the narrative is growing more crucial.

    It would never occur to a normal person that China needs to be made to submit to US interests and that economic sacrifices must be made to attain this goal which make their wallet lighter, for example. That’s the kind of change you can only get consent for if you manufacture that consent. The fact that the empire’s “great power competition” happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure the empire’s information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda.

    ❖

    So many Americans in my social media notifications bought fully into the shrieking hysteria about a fucking balloon the other day. Doesn’t bode well for how critically they’ll be thinking once the anti-China propaganda campaign really gets going.

    ❖

    Still blows my mind how the empire can rob Americans blind, keep them poor, deprive them of all normal social safety nets, oppress them, exploit them, throw them into the largest prison system on earth, work them into the ground, and then convince them to be angry at China.

    ❖

    All major US foreign policy maneuvers in today’s world are ultimately about preventing China from becoming an obstacle to US planetary rule. That’s all its shenanigans with Russia, Iran etc are ultimately about, and it’s what Ukraine is about too. If you don’t see this, you’re not seeing anything.

    If you say you oppose US foreign policy toward Russia but not toward China, then you don’t really oppose US foreign policy toward Russia, because it’s the same foreign policy. They’re just two aspects of the same one agenda.

    ❖

    Rank-and-file Australians are so pathetically aligned with US interests in their opinions because we have the most concentrated media ownership in the western world — a huge amount of it by Murdoch, who has been intimately intertwined with US government agencies for many decades.

    ❖

    A sizeable percentage of the people who shriek at me for criticizing US foreign policy are Bernie Sanders progressives and self-described “anarchists”. Very few of the people who think of themselves as fighting the power and opposing tyranny actually do.

    ❖

    The best measure of character for a journalist, analyst or commentator is whether they spend their time punching up or punching down. Are they always throwing shots at the world’s top power structure, or are they punching at weaker governments, other commentators, “tankies”, marginalized groups, etc?

    This is the best measure of character because consistently throwing punches at the very top is the least effective way to rise in influence and build a brand, because those who facilitate the interests of the powerful will be uplifted and amplified by the establishment power structure while those who work against those interests will not be. Someone who’s only ever punching up as high as possible  — never down or laterally — is more likely to be in it for nobler reasons than fame and fortune.

    This is also a good way to evaluate your own character. Are you always punching up as high as your arms can reach? Or are you getting lost in sectarianism, social media drama, or power-serving attacks on parts of the rank-and-file public? How high are your fists going? It’s a good habit to check in on this from time to time.

    _____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image .

  • They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.

    I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.

    Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.

    That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.

    Hamilton 68 purported to track Russian attempts to influence western thought on social media, but Twitter eventually figured out that the “Russians” the operation has been tracking were actually mostly real, mostly American accounts who just happened to say things that didn’t perfectly align with the official Beltway consensus. These accounts were often right-leaning, but also included people like Consortium News editor Joe Lauria, who’s about as far from a rightist as you can get.

    They played a massive role in fanning the flames of public hysteria about online Russian influence, but while they did this by pretending to track the behavior of Russian influence ops, in reality they were tracking dissent.

    One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being brainwashed by western propaganda into panicking about Russian propaganda, something that has no meaningful existence in the west. Before RT was shut down it was drawing a whopping 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according o Facebook. Research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

    Russia exerts essentially zero influence over what westerners think, yet we’re all meant to freak out about “Russian propaganda” while western oligarchs and government agencies continually hammer our minds with propaganda designed to manufacture our consent for the status quo which benefits them.

    All this and we’re still seeing calls for more narrative management from the western empire, like the recent American Purpose article “The Long War of Ideas” being promoted by people like Bill Kristol which calls for a resurrection of CIA culture war tactics like those used during the last cold war. Every day there’s some new liberal politician sermonizing about the need to do more to fight Russian influence and protect American minds from “disinformation”, even as we are shown over and over again that what they really want is to shut down dissident voices.

    That’s what we’re seeing in the continual efforts to increase online censorship, in the bogus new “fact-checking” industry, in calls to increase the output of formal US government propaganda operations like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, in the way all dissent about Russia has been forcefully purged from the western media in recent years, in the way empire-amplified trolling operations have been shouting down and drowning out critics of US foreign policy online, in the way censorship via algorithm has emerged as one of the major methods of restricting dissident speech.

    They claim there needs to be a massive escalation in propaganda, censorship and online psyops in order to fight “Russian influence”, while the only influence operations we’re being subjected to in any meaningful way are only ever of the western variety. They just want to do more of that.

    Our rulers aren’t actually worried about “Russian influence”, they’re worried about dissent. They’re worried the public won’t consent to the “great power competition” they plan to subject us to for the foreseeable future unless they can exert massive influence over our minds, because they know that otherwise we will recognize that our interests are directly harmed by the economic warfare, exploding military spending and nuclear brinkmanship which necessarily accompanies that campaign to reign in Russia and stop the rise of China.

    They’re propagandizing us about the threat of foreign propaganda in order to justify propagandizing us more. We’re being manipulated into consenting to agendas that no healthy person would ever consent to without copious amounts of manipulation.

    ______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Celebrities Protect The Interests Of The Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you say you oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist but you don’t oppose the US empire for its role in starting and perpetuating this war, then you’re a liar. You don’t oppose Russia because you’re an anti-imperialist, you oppose Russia because you’re an imperialist.

    The only people who say “Putin can end this war at any time by withdrawing” are those who deny the US empire’s aggressions which led to this conflict, which is just a nonsense garbage position based on lies. They don’t actually want peace, they just want victory for the empire. The real unbiased position which supports peace is wanting both Russia and the western empire to begin engaging in diplomacy, de-escalation and detente to end this war. But empire simps will call you treasonously biased if you support anything other than total Russian defeat.

    This dopey propaganda-addled notion that the west did nothing wrong and Putin attacked Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom actually prevents peace from happening. If one side only acknowledges the reality of the aggressions of the other side, peace is impossible. If you don’t understand how a war was started and perpetuated, then you can’t understand how peace can be started and perpetuated. The empire deliberately works to prevent the public from obtaining this understanding, because the empire wants war.

    It’s not okay for grown adults to act like Putin is just running around invading countries willy nilly because he’s a crazed madman. You’ve got a whole internet of information at your fingertips. Use it.

    ❖

    It’s impossible to overstate how much our society is shaped by the fact that those who are given the most influence and the largest platforms will experience our status quo systems as working very nicely and have a vested interest in preserving those systems which benefit them. The media-owning, culture-manufacturing class of the super-wealthy elevates people to wealth and celebrity who look like they will be good protectors of their class interests. Those people will necessarily speak fondly of the status quo political systems which let them be rich.

    These are the people who put on all the shows, movies and music almost everyone consumes, thereby engineering mainstream culture to the benefit of the super wealthy. It shapes the way the people think, speak, act and vote. What they feel entitled to. What they think is possible.

    A rich celebrity who makes millions of dollars a year in a fun, easy and egoically gratifying job is not going to be spotlighting all the lives who are being destroyed by the status quo systems which elevated them. They’re not going to favor the revolutionary changes that are needed. They’re not going to be calling for a massive, sweeping overhaul of the systems which are crushing ordinary people to death and creating widespread misery; at most they’re going to be telling you to vote Democrat or Republican and quibbling about minor disagreements on tax rates. But these are the people with the loudest voices in our society — not just the loudest, but many orders of magnitude more amplified and influential than the voices of the ordinary people who are suffering under existing systems. These loudly-amplified rich celebrities shape and direct mainstream culture.

    This dynamic plays such a massive role in hiding from mainstream attention the ways our status quo systems are exploiting, oppressing and abusing people while killing our biosphere and pushing us toward nuclear annihilation, that it’s hard to wrap your mind around how far it goes. The way everyone’s thinking about the world is so pervasively informed by perspectives that are favorable to the status quo prevents them from even noticing how bad things are for everyone else. It’s widely assumed that if you’re struggling in this mess, it’s because of your own failures. If any media you turn on depicts people who are doing basically fine and are content with the way things are while you’re barely able to keep your head above water, the take-home message is that the problem is with you, not with our systems. That you are what needs to change.

    The failings of the status quo are hidden in mainstream culture, and people aren’t permitted to consider the possibility that there might be a better way for things to be. People don’t know, and they don’t know that they don’t know. They’re kept in the dark about what’s possible.

     

    ❖

    People are like, “Oh yeah right Caitlin, it’s ALWAYS America’s fault. You’re always blaming the US for every conflict, just because it runs a globe-spanning empire which dominates the planet with violence and coercion and works continuously to keep all the other countries subjugated to it.”

    They’re like, “Right, right, blame EVERYTHING on the violent unipolar planetary hegemon.”

    It’s a lot like saying, “Okay sure we’re trapped in a room with a tiger, and sure we keep getting eaten, and yes your leg is missing and you’ve got a large bite out of your torso, but you can’t blame ALL of that on the tiger. It’s not fair. Some of it might be Steve’s fault. Steve’s kind of a jerk.”

    ❖

    People whose opinions are grounded in facts and logic don’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with them of being secret agents working for foreign governments.

    ❖

    ❖

    Most people on this planet couldn’t give a shit who governs Crimea, but one small group insists we risk every life in existence on earth — every bee, every frog, every tree, every child — for their current t-shirt-of-the-week issue. It’s so arrogant.

    It’s one thing to draw a line and say “The world must never let anyone cross this point, even if it means risking nuclear armageddon.” It’s quite another to make that line something as trivial as the question of who governs Crimea. It’s not legitimate to risk all life over that. This is especially true because the US empire provoked this war and because even the Crimeans themselves prefer to be Russian. But even if none of that was the case, it still wouldn’t be legitimate for the US empire to risk the lives of people in Africa or South America by backing an offensive on Crimea.

    The correct response to anyone who supports this is “Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck are you to risk the life of every human and non-human life on this planet over an issue only a tiny fraction of the world cares one whit about?”

    All these armchair warriors saying “We need to be brave and take a stand!” are willing to gamble billions of lives who do not consent to being gambled over a war they’re not even fighting in. All while refusing to deeply contemplate what nuclear war would entail. They’re the worst kind of cowards.

    ❖

    I just want the rapidly rising threat of nuclear war to be treated, reported on, and discussed like the supremely important issue that it is. It’s the single most important matter in the world and it just gets casually mentioned here and there like it’s just another issue.

    It’s actually a huge problem that nobody wants to talk about the single most important issue in the world and everyone acts like you’re a crazy hysterical idiot for pointing out the very real ways we’re moving closer to that very real possibility. I’ve been writing about the growing risk of nuclear war for years and people have been calling me a delusional lunatic and a Putin puppet the entire time, meanwhile we’ve demonstrably and indisputably been seeing massive steps toward that outcome and it’s still being dismissed.

    Even if you believe that all this nuclear brinkmanship is justified and good, you still need to fully acknowledge the reality of the risk and the unfathomable horrors that it would unleash upon our world. And you need to do it with all the respect and solemnity the subject deserves.

    ____________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    Feature image via https://www.president.gov.ua/ (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Prescription

    The post A Prescription first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine

    The 26 January JTA Daily Briefing arrived in my mailbox with the subject: “Major Israeli Raid in Jenin Kills 9 Palestinians.” I was sadly dumbfounded by the imparted insensitivity and inhumanity. Would any humanity-loving organization blare such news about the killing of the Other? Supposedly, the Oslo accords were a movement toward peace, but Zionist Israel has continued to wreak violence unabated, and Palestinians of every age and gender are the victims whether they be civilians or not. Yes, the violence is not only from one side, but the violence is overwhelmingly carried out by the Israeli side. And, when it comes to violence by Palestinians, one must realize that they have the right to resist oppression, occupation, siege, and violence.

    Imagine what would have been the reaction in the West if a headline had appeared — “Major Palestinian Raid in Tel Aviv Kills 9 Palestinians”?

    Such is the hypocrisy of the “West” that Israel can unleash lethal violence against Palestinians with scarcely a peep from the “West.” A Palestinian reprisal would undoubtedly be denounced in the strongest language as terrorism, and Palestinian officials would be called onto the carpet to unequivocally condemn the violence. Even the United Nations hardly comes across as a neutral party.

    The US can steal oil in open daylight from Syria, and there is not a peep from US-allied countries. Palestinians know this all too well, as Israel has been expropriating Palestinian oil and gas for years. The US occupies Cuban territory, and there is hardly a peep from the US-alliance. Britain can steal the gold reserves of the Venezuelan people, and there is little complaint from governments in the West.

    Western thievery has extended to Russia, as its bank assets were frozen by the US and by the European Union with the stated intention of using Russian assets to reconstruct Ukraine.

    The peoples of Palestine, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela people, among other nationalities, suffer from US thievery and violence. As an accomplice or silent actor, this also points to the inhumanity of US-allied governments. These are the same governments that criticize Russia for its “unprovoked invasion” of Ukraine.

    A Telling Comparison

    What happened when one out-of-uniform US marine officer, first lieutenant Robert Paz, was killed by Panamanian soldiers in December 1989? US president George HW Bush launched Operation Just Cause [sic]. A US invasion of Panama happened. About 600 Panamanians were killed (half civilians) and 23 US soldiers. Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, the drug-running CIA asset (and a person who should have been untouchable by having diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Article 29 reads, “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable.”) was abducted and brought back to the US to face American justice.

    Since 2014, following the US-orchestrated coup in Ukraine, a war has been carried out by the Ukrainian state, including its neo-Nazi fighters, against the predominantly ethnic Russian peoples of Donbass. Over 13,000 people had been killed, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.1

    Consider that the US invaded Panama after one US marine was killed, but the killing of thousands of ethnic Russians (who had been clamoring for secession to Russia) was muted by the US, the self-same country which created the circumstances that filliped Russia’s Special Military Operation to protect its security from further NATO encroachment.

    That the US invaded a country (many countries in its history) does not mitigate a Russian invasion of a country. But the invasions are not the same. There was no credible threat to US security from Syria, Palestine, Iran, Libya, Viet Nam, Venezuela, etc, but the US invaded or abetted the attack on these countries nonetheless. Russia has made irrefutably clear the security concerns posed by NATO missiles appearing on the Ukraine-Russia border just minutes away from Moscow. Russia was faced with an existential threat, a threat that the US would never allow (witness the US reaction to the stationing of Soviet missiles in Cuba).

    This essential background information will not appear in monopoly media.

    1. “According to calculations of the total number of human losses related to the conflict in Ukraine (from April 14, 2014 to January 31, 2021) amounts to 42,000-44,000: 13,100-13,300 killed (no less than 3,375 civilians, about 4,150 Ukrainian servicemen and approximately 5,700 members of armed groups)… Tass.
    The post Considering the Invasions of Panama and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Mass Media Used To Publish Perspectives On Ukraine That They Would Never Publish Today

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The other day I stumbled across a 2014 opinion piece in The Guardian titled “It’s not Russia that’s pushed Ukraine to the brink of war” by Seumas Milne, who the following year would go on to become the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications under Jeremy Corbyn.

    I bring this up because the perspectives you’ll find in that article are jarring in how severely they deviate from anything you’ll see published in the mainstream press about Ukraine in 2023. It places the brunt of the blame for the violence and tensions in that nation at that time squarely at Washington’s feet, opening with a warning that the “threat of war in Ukraine is growing” and saying there’s an “unelected government in Kiev,” and it only gets naughtier from there.

    I strongly recommend reading the article in full if you want some perspective in just how dramatically the mass media has clamped down on dissenting ideas about Ukraine and Russia, beginning with the frenzied stoking of Russia hysteria in 2016 and exploding exponentially with the Russian invasion last year. I doubt there’s a single paragraph which could get published in any mainstream outlet in the media environment of today.

    Milne writes about how “the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover,” and about “the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime.” He says that “Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia,” and that “you don’t hear much about the Ukrainian government’s veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government’s ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down.” He says that “after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west’s attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure.”

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

    In 2014 The Guardian published an op-ed about Ukraine by @SeumasMilne that would be shriekingly condemned as Russian propaganda today. I doubt there's a single paragraph in this article that could be published in today's mainstream media environment.https://t.co/Z7zRRbFrVo

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 23, 2023

    Milne says “Putin’s absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive,” and says the US and its allies have been “encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.” He correctly predicts that “one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese ‘pivot’ to Asia,” and presciently warns of “the threat of a return of big-power conflict” as Ukraine moves toward war.

    To be clear, Milne was not some fringe voice who happened to get picked up for one Guardian op-ed by a strange editorial fluke; he published hundreds of articles with The Guardian over the course of many years, and kept on publishing for a year and a half after this Ukraine piece came out, right up until he went to work for Corbyn. He was on the left end of the mainstream media, but he was very much part of the mainstream media.

    This article would of course have drawn controversy and criticism at the time; there were many people who were on the opposite side of the debate in 2014, though they would’ve had a fraction of the numbers of the shrieking conformity enforcers we see on all matters related to Ukraine today. Milne himself says that “the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage” after the Crimea annexation, so his article would have been an outlier to be sure. But the fact remains that it was published in The Guardian, and that it would never be published there today.

    Seriously, try to imagine an article like that about what happened in Ukraine in 2014 appearing in a mainstream publication like The Guardian in 2023. Can you imagine the hysterics? The histrionic garment-rending from the establishment narrative managers? The social media swarming of Zelenskyite trolls? This is after all the same media environment that pressured CBS to retract its story about how arms shipments to Ukraine weren’t getting where they were supposed to, and pressured Amnesty International to apologize for saying anything about Ukrainian war crimes.

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    .@guardian column by John Pilger is worth reading: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia | http://t.co/DVvcAjDB0Z

    — Katrina vandenHeuvel (@KatrinaNation) May 14, 2014

    Or how about this Guardian article by John Pilger titled “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia,” subtitled “Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world,” published two weeks after Milne’s?

    Pilger’s article is somehow even more heretical than Milne’s, saying Washington “masterminded the coup in February against the democratically elected government in Kiev” and that “Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”

    As with Milne, Pilger criticizes the media environment at the time, saying “propaganda” about what’s happening in Ukraine is happening in an “Orwellian style”. But again, his article was published in The Guardian, whereas today it never would be.

    Pilger has actually provided some background for this shift in mass media reporting, saying that there was a “purge” of dissident voices from The Guardian’s ranks around 2014-2015.

    “My written journalism is no longer welcome in The Guardian which, three years ago, got rid of people like me in pretty much a purge of those who really were saying what The Guardian no longer says any more,” Pilger reported in a January 2018 radio interview.

    Interestingly, a 2019 Declassified UK report found that British intelligence services began aggressively targeting The Guardian after its 2013 publication of the Edward Snowden documents, and found their in when the outlet’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was replaced by Katharine Viner in March 2015. After that point The Guardian began moving away from critical investigative reporting and began publishing softball “interviews” with MI5 and MI6 chiefs and willingly participating in the west’s information war against Russia.

    Once the western world plunged in unison into blinkered Russia hysteria after Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential election in 2016, we began seeing things like that time a BBC reporter admonished a guest for voicing unauthorized opinions about Syria because “we’re in an information war with Russia.”

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    BBC Reporter Discourages Syria Questions Due To “Information War” With Russia

    "You know you’re in trouble when the military man tries to do the journalist’s job by asking questions and holding power to account… and the journalist tries to stop him."https://t.co/DVxR3JQ6S2

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 18, 2018

    Whether or not you agree with the perspectives authored by Milne and Pilger is irrelevant to the very important fact that they could say things in the mainstream media in 2014 that they could never say in the mainstream media in 2023. The dramatic shift from a media environment where criticism of establishment Russia narratives is permitted to one where it is not permitted is worth noting, because it means there was a conscious shift toward converting the mass media into full-fledged cold war propaganda outlets.

    A lot of things have happened since 2014, but nothing about what happened in 2014 has changed since 2014. It’s still the same year it always was, because that’s how time works; nothing has changed about 2014 other than the thoughts you’re permitted to voice about it in mainstream outlets like The Guardian.

    This bizarre historical revisionism has been occurring not just in The Guardian but throughout the mainstream media. Last year Moon of Alabama published a piece titled “Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemned” which compiles many, many instances in which the mass media have reported on Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem over the years, and contrasts this with the way the mass media now whitewashes those paramilitaries and pretends they’re just fine upstanding patriots. In the years prior to the Russian invasion there were neo-Nazis in Ukraine; now there are no neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there never have been and you’re a treasonous Putin puppet if you say otherwise. Nothing actually changed about Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem; all that changed is the narrative.

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    MoA – Apr 30, 2022:

    Media Are Now Whitewashing Nazis They Had Previously Condemnedhttps://t.co/7suYcVyzdu https://t.co/jLsMc6kQpH

    — Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) December 4, 2022

    Everyone should be aware that the mass media have drastically changed the perspectives they’re willing to publish on Ukraine, because it proves that these outlets are not working to help create a well-informed populace and facilitate important conversations, but are in fact knowingly operating as war propaganda firms. They’re not trying to inform people about what’s going on in the world, they’re trying to manipulate the way people think about the world. These two goals could not possibly be more different.

    Power is controlling what happens; true power is controlling what people think about what happens. They’re re-writing history to influence control over what people think about the present. As old Orwell put it, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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  • The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth

    Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.

    – George Orwell, 1984

    As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me.

    Soon after I was greeted by an editorial from the New York Times‘ Editorial Board, “A Brutal New Phase of the War in Ukraine.”  It is a piece of propaganda so obvious that only those desperate to believe blatant lies would not fall down laughing.  Yet it is no laughing matter, for the N.Y. Times is advocating for a wider war, more lethal weapons for Ukraine, and escalation of the fighting that risks nuclear war.  So their title is apt because they are promoting the brutality.  This angered me.

    The Times’ Editorial Board tells us that President Putin, like Hitler, is mad.  “Like the last European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.” Russia and Putin are “cruel”; are conducting a “regular horror” with missile strikes against civilian targets; are “desperate”; are pursuing Putin’s “delusions”; are waging a “terrible and useless war”; are “committing atrocities”; are responsible for “murder, rape and pillaging,” etc.

    On the other hand, “a heroic Ukraine” “has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces” who have lost “well over 100,000 Russian soldiers killed and wounded,” according to the “reliable” source, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley.  To add to this rosy report, the Ukrainians seem to have suffered no causalities since none are mentioned by the cozy Times’ Editorial Board members from their keyboards on Eighth Avenue.  When you support a U.S. war, as has always been the Times’ modus operandi as a stenographer for the government, mentioning the dead pawns used to accomplish the imperialists’ dreams is bad manners. So are the atrocities committed by those forces, so they too have been omitted. Neo-Nazis, the Azov Battalion? They too must never have  existed since they are not mentioned.

    But then, according to the esteemed editorial writers, this is not a U.S. proxy war waged via Ukraine by U.S./NATO “to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness.” No, it is simply Russian aggression, supported by “the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery” that has churned “out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery.” U.S./NATO were “horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order,” so we are laughingly told, and so came to Ukraine’s defense as “Mr. Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine.”

    Nowhere in this diatribe by the Times’ Board of propagandists – and here the whole game is given away for anyone with a bit of an historical sense – is there any mention of the U.S. engineered coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It just didn’t happen. Never happened. Magic by omission.  The U.S., together with the Ukrainian government “led” by the puppet-actor “President Volodymyr Zelensky,” are completely innocence parties, according to the Times.  (Note also, that nowhere in this four page diatribe is President Putin addressed by his title, as if to say that “Mr. Putin” is illegitimate and Zelensky is the real thing.)

    All the problems stem from when “Mr. Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine n 2014.”

    Nowhere is it mentioned that for years on end U.S./NATO has been moving troops and weapons right up to Russia’s borders, that George W. Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and that Trump did the same with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, that the U.S. has set up so-called anti-ballistic missile sites in Poland and Romania and asserted its right to a nuclear first-strike, that more and more countries have been added to NATO’s eastern expansion despite promises to Russia to the contrary, that 15,000 plus mostly Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine have been killed by Ukrainian forces for years before February 2022, that the Minsk agreements were part of a scheme to give time for the arming of Ukraine, that the U.S. has rejected all calls from Russia to respect its borders and its integrity, that the U.S./NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases, that there was a vote in Crimea after the coup, that the U.S. has been for years waging economic war on Russia via sanctions, etc. In short, all of the reasons that Russia felt that it was under attack for decades and that the U.S. was stone deaf to its appeals to negotiate these threats to its existence. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if all were reversed and Russia had put troops and weapons in Mexico and Canada that the United States would respond forcefully.

    This editorial is propaganda by omission and strident stupidity by commission.

    The editorial has all its facts “wrong,” and not by accident.  The paper may say that its opinion journalists’ claims are separate from those of its newsroom, yet their claims echo the daily barrage of falsehoods from its front pages, such as:

    • Ukraine is winning on the battlefield.
    • “Russia faces decades of economic stagnation and regression even if the war ends soon.”
    • That on Jan.14, as part of its cruel attacks on civilian targets, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing many.
    • Only one man can stop this war – Vladimir Putin – because he started it.
    • Until now, the U.S. and its allies were reluctant to deploy heavy weapons to Ukraine “for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-West war.”
    • Russia is desperate as Putin pursues “his delusions.”
    • Putin is “isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power.”
    • Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014.
    • During the last 11 months Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces …. The war is at a stalemate.”
    • The Russian people are being subjected to the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery “churning out false narratives.”

    This is expert opinion for dummies. A vast tapestry of lies, as Harold Pinter said in his Nobel Prize address. The war escalation the editorial writers are promoting is in their words, “this time pitting Western arms against a desperate Russia,” as if the U.S./NATO does not have CIA and special forces in Ukraine, just weapons, and as if “this time” means it wasn’t so for the past nine years at least as the U.S. was building Ukraine’s military and arms for this very fight.

    It is a fight they will lose in the days to come. Russia was, is, and will triumph.

    Everything in the editorial is disingenuous. Simple propaganda: the good guys against the bad guys. Putin another Hitler. The good guys are winning, just as they did in Vietnam, until reality dawned and it had to be admitted they weren’t (and didn’t). History is repeating itself.

    Little has changed and so my morning sense of mourning when I remembered Nixon and Kissinger’s savagery at Christmas 1972 was appropriate. As then, so today, we are being subjected to a vast tapestry of lies told by the corporate media for their bosses, as the U.S. continues its doomed efforts to control the world. It is not Russia that is desperate now, but propagandists such as the writers of this strident and stupid editorial. It is not the Russian people who need to wake up, as they claim, but the American people and those who still cling to the myth that the New York Times Corporation is an organ of truth. It is the Ministry of Truth with its newspeak, double-speak, and its efforts to change the past.

    Let Harold Pinter have the last words:

    The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

    The post The New York Times is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT

    An obliquely-written news-report in the New York Times on January 18th headlined “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea” and subheaded “The Biden administration is considering the argument that Kyiv needs the power to strike at the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.” It reported that, “the Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thousands of dug-in Russian troops and numerous Russian military bases.”

    It goes on to say that this “would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.” This news-story omitted to mention that according to Russian law, Crimea (which was part of Russia throughout 1783-1954 when the Soviet Union’s dictator, a Ukrainian, arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine) was restored to Russia on 16 March 2014, when a vote by Crimea’s residents supported by over 90% the return of Crimea to being a part of Russia, and Russia accepted that application by the Crimean people, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia. None of this was mentioned in the NYT’s news-report, nor was the fact mentioned there that even U.S. polling of the residents of Crimea, both before and after the 2014 plebiscite there, found over 90% of respondents to want restoration of Crimea as being a part of Russia. All of that crucial information has been kept secret from the American people, and from the people in U.S.-allied countries — they don’t know it. The NYT’s article says only that Crimea is “the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.”

    Furthermore, the NYT’s news-report fails to mention that on 8 June 2020, Russia published from Putin’s office, “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence,” which presented four circumstances, lettered “a” through “d”, under which “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist; and letter “a” there is: “arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” In other words: “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist if America and Ukraine carry out “a launch of ballistic missiles attacking” Crimea. According to Russian law, Crimea is, again, a part of Russia; it certainly is part of “the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” It falls under Russia’s stated nuclear umbrella, Russia’s protection up to and including the use of nuclear weapons — the four official conditions under which Russia MIGHT respond by means of nuclear weapons. (And: it falls under “circumstance” “a” — the first one that is listed.)

    Russia might not employ nuclear weapons in the event of such an attack against Crimea — it might instead respond without nuclear warheads, but only with non-nuclear ones; and, since the invasion of Crimea would have been carried out by both Ukraine and America, Ukraine and/or America would be targeted. If Ukraine would be targeted, then America might defend Ukraine by further attacking Russia — perhaps only in Crimea, but perhaps not. In any case: Washington and Kiev would jointly have violated the top condition in which Russia might respond with nuclear weapons; and, so, a second attack by America and Ukraine against Russia would almost certainly result in a nuclear response by Russia; and, as Scott Ritter has already noted, any circumstance in which one or more of Russia’s red lines have already been crossed by America and/or by one of America’s allies would precipitate a launch by Russia of its entire nuclear stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons, from land, sea, and air, which would mean, within perhaps 30 minutes to an hour, game-over for everyone, and the end of life on Earth — not by some delayed “nuclear winter,” but immediately by the direct blast-effects and the intense nuclear radiation then spread throughout the entire atmosphere of the planet.

    Though the NYT hid this crucial additional information, I don’t, though perhaps the hundreds of U.S.-and-allied news-media that I am submitting this news-report to might all decide not to publish it. Anyway: they all are receiving it on January 22nd. We’ll see which ones publish it, and whether ONLY ones that Google bans do publish it, in which case this news-report still will appear here, even if that turns out to be the only place that does.

    The post U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Rampant Speculation: Uranium, Dirty Bombs and Heathrow

    The dirty bomb and its purportedly famed radiation dispersal attributes has an undeserved mythology. It serves to bloat budgets and confer grants on specious theories propounded by specious theorists. It is all rather easy to make a security threat up, and a celluloid, Hollywood scenario of a dirty bomb going off in the middle of a metropolis killing thousands is just one of those instances. Scaring people is child’s play and often the work of the unscrupulous.

    This month, it was announced that staff at London’s Heathrow airport, where the appearance of snowflakes is enough to cancel flights, encountered what was alleged to be cargo contaminated by uranium on December 29. The Sun was the first paper to scream from the rooftops about a “Deadly shipment of uranium seized at Heathrow en route to Iranians based in UK”. The paper went on to suggest that the material in question “can be used in a dirty bomb.” In the narrative, all the appropriate countries were mentioned: dark origins in Pakistan; arrival on a flight from Oman; destination: UK-based nationals from Iran.

    The relevant authorities were also involved. Border Force agents “swooped and isolated the unregistered shipment in a dedicated radioactive room.” Counter-terrorism police “were alerted and a security probe launched into who sent the cargo.” An unnamed source excitedly told The Sun that relevant security bosses “are treating this with the seriousness it deserves. Protocol was not followed and this is now an anti-terror operation.”

    The Met Police issued a statement on January 10 confirming that “officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command were contacted by Border Force colleagues at Heathrow after a very small amount of contaminated material was identified after routine screening within a package incoming to the UK on December 29.”

    The Daily Mail went so far as to describe the quantity as being all uranium, running into “several kilos”. An unspecified source told the paper that, “The package contained kilos of uranium – but it was not weapons-grade.” Never one to be troubled by the irritations of evidence, the Mail ignored the Met Police’s own description of the seized cargo as being contaminated material of a “very small amount”. The Guardian was more conservative in its assessment: the shipment consisted of “metal bars embedded with uranium.”

    That such minute quantities were involved was also confirmed by the head of the Met’s SO15 counter-terror branch, Commander Richard Smith: “I want to reassure the public that the amount of contaminated material was extremely small and has been assessed by experts as posing no threat to the public.”

    Commander Smith, to his credit, was not keen to nourish the tabloid fear machine. “Although our investigation remains ongoing, from our inquiries so far, it does not appear to be linked to any direct threat. As the public would expect, we will continue to follow up on all available lines of enquiry to ensure this is definitely the case.”

    The security experts were immediately called in to sing for their ill-deserved supper. Will Geddes suggested that this was a “dry-run” operation, despite admitting that it was “speculation” on his part. “If you are trying to move contraband through an environment like a drug dealer would, you may courier it through certain channels to see which ones work before moving larger amounts.”

    Further speculation from Geddes followed. “If the uranium is unrefined, it would be used in a nuclear facility, if it is refined it would be more likely to be used in a dirty bomb. If it is refined, that would indicate a malicious device of some sort.”

    Former commander of the UK’s nuclear defence regiment Hamish De Bretton-Gordon was troubled. “For the uranium to turn up on a commercial airliner from Pakistan to an Iranian address in the UK is very suspect.” He proceeded to add fuel to the fire. “The nuclear threat has never been higher. Higher than it has ever been in the Cold War.”

    From the corridors of speculation, The Sun managed to pinch another opinion worthy of celebration by the jingoes, this time from an unnamed “former army chief”, who claimed that the “deadly shipment could have been used for a Litvinenko-style assassination plot.”

    Despite the growing compendium of concerns, a more sensible undercurrent of opinion did suggest that the uranium in question was, in all likelihood, too bulky and ineffectual to be used in the making of a bomb device. Bahram Ghiassee of the Henry Jackson Society, a neoconservative outfit not always known for its moderate stance, was critical of the news coverage suggesting that the bomb scenario was even plausible. “For dirty bombs, you need highly radioactive material … and uranium is not suitable at all.”

    It should have been also clear to the alarmists that detecting undeclared radioactive material at transport hubs and ports of entry are not infrequent occurrences, the UK being no exception.

    Since the revelation, a man in his 60s has been arrested under section 9 of the Terrorism Act of 2006, which criminalises the possession of radioactive materials with the intent of using them for terrorism purposes. He has been released on bail pending a hearing in April. While such legal wheels turn, the yellow press merchants will continue to do their worst, inflating unnecessary threats, while ignoring others.

    The post Rampant Speculation: Uranium, Dirty Bombs and Heathrow first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day

    What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves… what may be called the sociological imagination.

    – C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

    In what follows, I offer some conclusions I have arrived at and am skipping all the steps taken to arrive there.  Everyone needs to follow their own path to the end.

    I know Mills was right when he penned those words long ago. Arguments don’t go too far to convince others; only self-directed investigations do. It is a question of the moral will-to-truth and the desire to be free, plus the imagination to connect the dots using reason that lead to conclusions that make sense. There are many explanations for every public issue and personal problem under the sun that tell us why this or that is true or false. But since we live in an age of non-stop lies and propaganda, determination and the willingness to do our homework is essential. The following summations are the results of my study over many years, and this is a partial list.

    There comes a time to state them outright and as clearly and concisely as possible, when silence is betrayal, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said so passionately in his speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” from the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered by U.S. government forces. He said:

    This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

    I feel bound by that deeper loyalty and offer these summations in that spirit.

    • The United States is now, and has long been, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. It is led by leaders possessed by a demonic spirit leading the world toward nuclear conflagration by initiating and waging war against Russia via Ukraine.  It cares not a bit for all the dead and suffering victims of its policies there and around the world.
    • Because he so passionately denounced the warmakers and fought for racial and economic justice, MLK, Jr. was murdered by the same government that later gave him a national holiday to hide its guilt.
    • Most people in the U.S.A. do not care that this is true but wish to live their small-world lives, not thinking about it. Indifference reigns.  Another holiday means more shopping at the sale counters.
    • Anyone who reminds them of this is considered a pain in the ass or worse.
    • The violence of the U.S. state is directed not just against people in other countries but against those who live in the United States. This has long been true as the CIA and the FBI have conspired assiduously for decades to control the population while the Pentagon slaughters people all over the world.  Mind control is necessary to achieve this goal.
    • To accept this reality is anathema to most people, for it means their own government is their enemy and that they are its targets, this being contrary to the myth of democracy.
    • This targeting of Americans by their government is not new but has reached new heights in recent years as the national-security state and its organs of propaganda in the media have gone on steroids.
    • The corporate mass media, and elements of the “alternative media,” are the key organs of this propaganda and are completely infiltrated by the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI, etc.
    • Agents of these agencies, while enemies of regular people, are often seen as friends because their deviousness is profound. They smile a lot with their fake white teeth.  “One may smile and smile and still be a villain,” wrote the Bard.
    • All the wars known and unknown waged by the U.S. warfare state are based on lies and propaganda that’s been developed over a century and more. Actually since the founding of the country and its extermination of native peoples.
    • Not some foreign country or its secrets agents, but the U.S. National security state led by the CIA and FBI has assassinated all anti-war, racial and economic justice leaders who have tried to change things: JFK, Malcom X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, et al., and anyone who tries to distract from this fact by ambiguity and slick words is serving the national security state. Many of these people are assets or agents of the intelligence services and there are far more of them than one can imagine.
    • The events of September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks were carried out by elements within the U.S. national-security state and not by foreign terrorists under the leadership of Osama bin Laden. That their own government would kill thousands of innocent people is beyond the imagination of so many Americans because they have bought the myth of U.S. innocence and on a personal level have come to think of themselves as victims also.
    • Such thinking is self-destructive. While it is very true that everyone has been subject to vast and never-ending government propaganda campaigns, the only remedy is to fight back by assuming all official pronouncements are false until proven otherwise, and to do one’s homework.
    • This sense of victimhood is the result of decades-long propaganda that has been promulgated by all institutions that have taught and reaffirmed a materialistic philosophy that there is no free will but only biological and social forces that make people who they are. Key to this is the promotion and use of drugs for all problems.
    • The War on Drugs has always been the War on us, a deep fake intended to distract and control the population. This includes all the happy “pills” and drugs used to silence thought and the connection between the social and the personal, like anti-depressants, etc.
    • The War on Terror was a war to kill as many foreigners, mainly Muslims, as possible, and to kill the conscience of decent people by appealing to their worst prejudices and fears. It was used to institute the Patriot Act and tighten the stranglehold of unfreedom on the population.
    • Yet this “war on terror” that has led to the wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, China, Russia, etc., was long preceded by decades long wars against Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Iraq, Yugoslavia, throughout Africa, etc. – endless open and secret wars all over the world.
    • The promotion of fear has been the prime propaganda tactic of the Deep State. Fear to immobilize the population to do as the propagandists tell us. It’s all about control. The root of all fears is the fear of death, thus the power to assassinate dissidents, wage war, and kill through “medicine” are all employed by the power elites.
    • Reality, by any simple definition, or news as the communication of reality, has been replaced by entertainment. Everything is now a spectacle geared to a crowd of naïve children who sit on the edge of their seats enjoying the disasters that are continuously promoted to induce fear and passivity.
    • The War of Drugs used against the population, while having been waged for many decades, has since March and April 2020 been internationalized and coordinated as a global coup d’état against humanity with the Covid-19 propaganda program with its lock-downs, deadly “vaccines,” and push for the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset.” Corporate media led (and leads) this propaganda pandemic narrative that has abrogated human and constitutional rights in the service of corporate capital interests, resulting in the enrichment of the richest few and the impoverishment, injury, and death of the many.  It is the vastest propaganda campaign in history and continues unceasingly even as all its claims have been shown to be false.
    • Central to all the efforts of the international gang of political and financial gangsters responsible for so many crimes against humanity is their deep-seated nihilism and their antagonism to the religious spirit of love and non-violence that informs the great religions of the world. Demonic is the best word to describe their evil deeds.
    • The digital revolution is more accurately described as the digital propaganda program with the cell phone being the key to its enactment. It is an effort to coax people into loving their machines more than the human touch and to think of themselves as extensions of their machines.  Clicking numbers, statistical analysis, the mathematical mindset, etc. have all been used to indoctrinate people into a world of artificial intelligence and robotic thinking in which flesh and blood become abstractions and nature something to be conquered and controlled.
    • This so-called “digital revolution” with its computer technology dominating people’s lives has allowed the ruling elites to penetrate deep into the population’s psyches without them knowing it. It has allowed propaganda to infiltrate every moment of every day as people click the buttons on the machines they think are their lifelines to reality.  All becomes a miasma of manufactured illusions and spectacles in the service of the “third industrial revolution.”
    • All of this is part of a “spiritual” machine revolution in which the human spirit and its connections to God, nature, and our common humanity is slowly extinguished, everything that MLK said was necessary for our salvation.
    • Martin Luther King was a transmitter of a radical non-violent spiritual and political energy so plenipotent that his very existence was a threat to an established order based on institutionalized violence, racism, and economic exploitation.  He was a very dangerous man to the U.S. government and all the institutional and deep state forces armed against him. So they killed him.
    • The best “service” we can offer on Martin Luther King Day is recognize that fact and oppose the evil and violent forces directing the American nightmare.
    • And to do our homework connecting the dots that run down the years.
    The post Lucid Summations When Tomorrow Is Today and MLK Day first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Recalling CNN’s Fraudulent “Interview” With A Seven Year-Old Syrian Girl

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    There’s a thread going around on Twitter by Columbia University’s Sophie Fullerton advancing the claim that I have promoted crazy conspiracy theories about child “crisis actors” in Syrian war atrocities. Fullerton has me blocked on Twitter so I can’t respond to her there, but in her thread she brings up one of the most egregious instances I’ve ever seen of US war propaganda in the mass media, so it’s worth taking some time to unpack her claims here as a public service.

    Fullerton has written for The Washington Post slamming social media users who travel to Syria and dispute the official mainstream narrative about what’s been happening in that country, and has served as an expert analyst in a Daily Beast hit piece on the progressive Gravel Institute for their scrutiny of US warmongering. So it’s fair to call her a spinmeister on the side of the US empire, and it’s probably fair to predict that her young career will bring her tremendous success and mainstream elevation as a result of this.

    “It takes a special kind of evil to see what happened yesterday in Dnipro and immediately start doing PR for the perpetrator,” Fullerton tweets, with a screenshot of me saying it’s deceitful for people to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war. “It should come at no surprise that this account built a following out of claiming Syrian children impacted by Assad/Russia atrocities were crisis actors,” she adds.

    Fullerton’s thread has gained a lot of traction because it has been amplified by Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the imperialist think tank Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) with a large following. CEPA’s donor list includes the US State Department, the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, and the weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and General Atomics.

    Fullerton uses the phrase “crisis actors” to evoke the image most people have of that term and what it means: conspiracy theories about actors pretending to have been wounded or otherwise involved in a false flag mass shooting or bombing incident, particularly Alex Jones’s infamous claims about Sandy Hook victims. Google defines “crisis actor” as “a person who takes part in a supposed conspiracy to manipulate public opinion by pretending to be a victim of an event such as a bombing, mass shooting, or natural disaster.” Imperial spinmeisters have a history of using the phrase “crisis actors” to smear skeptics of dubious claims by the US empire about what’s been happening in Syria as crazy conspiracy theorists who are the same as Sandy Hook deniers.

    But for her evidence of my “crisis actors” conspiracy theorizing, Fullerton cites something very different from any such claim. She cites an article I wrote in 2018 titled “That Time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda“, and revealingly she includes only a screenshot of the top of the article rather than providing a link. She did this because the arguments made in the article are unassailable, and she doesn’t want people to see them.

    In 2017 CNN conducted a fraudulent interview with a seven year-old Syrian child named Bana Alabed, whose name had earlier been popularized by a Twitter account operated by an adult calling for US interventionism in Syria to overthrow president Bashar al-Assad. I know the interview was fraudulent not because I’m some kind of dogged investigative journalist who spent months digging into the facts and the sources, but because I watched the interview. It is plain as day that the child was either reading or reciting words that had been prepared for her, and every comment I can see on CNN’s YouTube share of the segment agrees with this assessment. To the best of my knowledge, no serious attempt has ever been made by anyone to dispute this.

    Fullerton claims that my article “attacks Bana al-Abed”, but if you actually read it you will see that what I am in fact attacking is CNN for staging a bogus interview with a child who is clearly reading or reciting words authored by an adult, and CNN’s Alisyn Camerota for playing along with this sham. My article at no time mentions the phrase “crisis actor” (pretty sure I’ve never even used those words except in reference to claims made by other people), and it is quite obvious from the child’s awkward recitations in her CNN appearance that she is not an actor by nature.

    No intellectually honest person with any sense of normal human speech will ever claim that this interview was anything but scripted. And, I mean, of course it is. A CNN anchor asked a seven year-old child for her opinions on who is responsible for a chemical weapons attack on Syria and repeatedly asked her for her perspective on the highly complex and multifaceted conflict in her country; the only way you’re going to get answers to those questions from a child that age is if you feed them to her. This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say.

    But even if you accept on faith the idea of a seven year-old child conducting off-the-cuff military analysis and geopolitical punditry on cable television, it is evident from the video that that isn’t what’s happening. She not only speaks like someone with no acting experience reading from a script, she sounds like someone who is not fluent in English simply sounding out English words phonetically.

    Which would make sense, because other video evidence indicates that she did not speak English very well around the time of her CNN appearance:

    In footage from an interview in Turkey (where according to the CNN chyron Alabed also conducted the Camerota interview from), Alabed is asked in English if she likes the food in Istanbul. She replies “Yes,” and when asked what food she likes, Alabed replies “Save the children of Syria.” Her mother says something to her, and then Alabed replies, “Fish.”

    She did not understand the question. But Sophie Fullerton wants you to believe this child was engaging in adult-level conversation about complicated ideas on CNN, in fluent English.

    Again, this is not an attack on a Syrian child. It would be insane and ridiculous to expect a seven year-old Syrian to be fluent in English and to be able to articulate highly advanced analysis about what’s been happening in her native country, so I am of course not criticizing her inability to do so. I am absolutely criticizing the war propagandists who put her up to it, though, and I am absolutely criticizing those who run apologia for their having done so.

    The US-centralized empire’s dirty war on Syria has had many atrocious elements to it over the years, and an abundance of propaganda and spin have been used to facilitate them. But never has it been so in-your-face brazen as when CNN staged a plainly fraudulent interview with a small child.

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Prison Where The Prisoners Don’t Know They’re In Prison: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Talking about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war is the same as lying.

    ❖

    One of the main differences between myself and other commentators who talk about an elite conspiracy to implement a totalitarian dystopia is that the others warn that we are being pushed toward this dystopia, while I insist that we’re already there and have been for generations.

    When I say we’re in a totalitarian dystopia a lot of people assume I mean things like vaccine mandates or gun laws or paying taxes, but I actually mean something far, far bigger than that. I mean we’re all in a psychological prison built by the powerful to control how we are.

    The Orwellian dystopia isn’t some danger that exists in the future; it’s here presently. It just doesn’t look like what Orwell imagined. Our rulers are getting everything they want out of the current dystopia, just as much as they would in societies envisioned by dystopian novelists.

    It is true that we are seeing more and more overtly tyrannical measures rolled out in areas like surveillance and suppression of speech, but those are not means of getting us into the dystopian prison, they are means of keeping us there. They’re just tightening the bolts on our cage.

    You can tell we’re in a psychological prison because everyone’s getting crazier and crazier. Mental illness and addiction are soaring, there’s a mass shooting epidemic in the United States, and everyone’s feeling increasingly miserable and alienated. This is because we’re all propagandized to the gills. We’re acting like victims of psychological abuse because that’s what we are. We’ve spent our whole lives having our minds systematically pounded into a shape that makes us think, speak, act and vote in a way that benefits our rulers.

    Because they control the way we think with mass scale psychological manipulation, their control is total. It’s as total as it would be in the civilization laid out in Orwell’s 1984. We won’t be doing anything they don’t want us doing while our minds are locked down like this. What we have is actually far more effective than an overly tyrannical dystopia, because it looks like freedom. They let you do more or less what you want, while using mass-scale psychological manipulation to control what it is that you will want to do.

    What’s harder to escape than a maximum security prison? A prison where the prisoners don’t even know they’re in prison.

    ❖

    Sometimes it feels like our rulers make up culture war topics on the fly, just to win bets with each other.

    “Fifty bucks says we can get them all arguing about gas stoves next.”

    “Haha! No. No fucking way they’ll go for that. You’re on.”

    ❖

    Without NATO who will protect the vast expanse of radioactive ashes from the other vast expanse of radioactive ashes?

    ❖

    The most important reporting a journalist can do in the western world today is help expose the lies, propaganda and malpractice of other western journalists and news outlets. But that is also the last thing a western journalist is ever likely to do.

    ❖

    On economic policy Democrats are indistinguishable from Reagan-era Republicans. On foreign policy they’re indistinguishable from Bush-era neocons. But they’re still able to sell the idea that they’re progressive, even moving far to the left, by copious lip service to social justice.

    Democrats will bomb you, starve you with sanctions, evict you, let you freeze to death, let you die because you can’t afford medicine, let you work your fingers to the bone for pennies, but they will never, ever misgender you.

    And rightists are all too happy to take that last bit as evidence that Democrats have in fact moved “too far to the left” and argue that US politics needs to move much farther to the right to counteract all the leftist extremism.

    ❖

    People argue that you can’t blame the US for all the millions of deaths ensuing from its “war on terror” interventions because many of those deaths were caused by sectarian infighting, but that’s like an arsonist saying “It’s not my fault the house burned down! The fire did most of the damage!”

    ❖

    Ultimately the problem is not capitalism, imperialism, oligarchy or authoritarianism. Ultimately the problem is that we’re a deeply unconscious species who hasn’t yet developed a mature relationship with its recently-evolved large brain. Those other issues are symptoms of this.

    This can change quickly. Humans likely had no language of any kind for a long time, then suddenly they did. We’ve been coasting along unconsciously reacting to our obsolete evolutionary conditioning and ancient heritage of trauma this entire time, and suddenly that can stop.

    Every species eventually hits a juncture where it either adapts to changing conditions or goes extinct. All signs indicate that we are rapidly approaching that juncture currently. If we make the necessary adaptations, they will look like a change in our relationship with thought.

    ❖

    The primary complaints about Gen Z ultimately boil down to “They refuse to work shitty jobs for shit pay” and “They’re too nice to people who are different”. Which says just as much about the quality of the older generations as the quality of the new one.

    I’m always yammering on here about what it’s going to take to turn this human catastrophe around, but sometimes I think it might turn out that all that needs to happen is for all us old assholes to age out and leave the world in better hands than our own.

    ___________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Feature image via Pixabay.

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Top 20 Most Cringeworthy Zelensky PR Moments

    The US empire’s proxy war in Ukraine has had many jaw-dropping instances of imperialist sociopathy, propagandistic audacity and brazen journalistic malpractice that we’ve discussed in this space many times, but one of the most cringeworthy and degrading aspects of the globe-spanning narrative control campaign surrounding this war has been the way the nation’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has been turned into an ever-present corporate mascot for the most aggressive ad campaign ever devised. The way the most powerful institutions in the western world have been throwing their puppet in everyone’s face to sell the empire’s proxy warfare puts Ronald McDonald to shame.

    Here are 20 of the cringiest moments of establishment PR using Zelensky to market the McProxy War to the western world, in no particular order.

    1. A House Republican introducing a bill to place a bust of Zelensky in the US Capitol building

    Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

    Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) introduced a bill this week that would place a bust of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the House wing of the US Capitol building, an idea that was strongly criticized by more conservative GOP members.

    2. The fake Hollywood action hero-sounding “I need ammunition, not a ride” quote

    The only source for the quote was a single unnamed US government official, yet numerous mainstream media outlets reported it as fact instead of ignoring it for the baseless nonsense that it plainly was, and now it’s part of the official narrative.

    3. The Vogue cover shoot

    5. Time Magazine Person of the Year

    6. Star Wars: Attack of the Drones

    7. Zelensky giving a speech at the Golden Globes

    8. Zelensky giving a speech for the Grammys

    9. Zelensky getting an Academy Award from actor Sean Penn

    10. Zelensky addressing the World Economic Forum

    11. Zelensky giving a speech and ringing the bell for the New York Stock Exchange

    12. Zelensky giving a speech at the secretive Bilderberg Group (probably)

    We’d never know if Zelensky actually did end up making a video appearance because of Bilderberg’s notorious secrecy, but ahead of the meeting The Guardian reported he probably would:

    “The conference room is rigged up with video screens for shy dignitaries to make a virtual attendance, and it’s highly likely that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will Zoom in for a T-shirted contribution to the talks. Just a few days beforehand, Zelenskiy met with a Bilderberg and US intelligence representative Alex Karp, who runs Palantir, the infamous CIA-funded surveillance and data analysis company.”

    13. Zelensky giving a speech at the Cannes Film Festival

    14. Zelensky giving a speech at the Glastonbury Festival

    15. Weird Hologram Zelensky at the Founders Forum in the UK

    16. Zelensky meeting with Ben Stiller

    17. The Ukrainian flag performance in the US congress

     

    18. The bizarre Biden-Zelensky slow motion action-heroes-walking-away-from-an-explosion video clip

    19. Guest on David Letterman’s show

    20. The obligatory Bono psyop

    Honorable mention: Zelensky meeting with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to help “rebuild” (read: buy up) Ukraine

     Honorable mention: DC party at the Ukrainian embassy openly hosted by the US military-industrial complex

    Are people not tired of having their intelligence insulted yet?

    ________________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Reminder: Conscious, Pervasive Manipulation and “Fake News” is NOT New

    The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.
    — Edward Bernays

    The Edward Bernays quote up top comes from his 1928 book, Propaganda. Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He was also a public relations pioneer, and one of America’s most innovative social engineers.

    In the early 20th century, he was called upon to, um, persuade a wary U.S. populace into pulling a complete 180 to support their nation’s entry into World War I.

    Bernays teamed with veteran newspaperman George Creel to form the Committee on Public Information. Founded in 1917, the Creel Committee (as it came to be known) was the first government agency for outright propaganda in U.S. history.

    It published 75 million books and pamphlets, had 250 paid employees, and mobilized 75,000 volunteer speakers known as “Four-Minute Men,” who delivered their pro-war messages in churches, theaters, and other places of civic gatherings.

    The idea, of course, was to give the war effort a positive spin. “It is not merely an army that we must train and shape for war,” President Woodrow Wilson declared at the time, “it is an entire nation.”

    The age of manipulated public opinion had begun in earnest.

    Although Wilson won reelection in 1916 on a promise of peace, it wasn’t long before he severed diplomatic relations with Germany and proposed arming U.S. merchant ships — even without congressional authority.

    Upon declaring war on Germany in December 1917, the president proclaimed, “conformity will be the only virtue and any man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” (Sound familiar?)

    In time, the masses got the message — as demonstrated by these (and other) results:

    • 14 states passed laws forbidding the teaching of the German language.
    • Iowa and South Dakota outlawed the use of German in public or on the telephone.
    • From coast to coast, German-language books were ceremonially burned.
    • The Philadelphia Symphony and the New York Metropolitan Opera Company excluded Beethoven, Wagner, and other German composers from their programs.
    • German shepherds were renamed Alsatians; dachshunds became Liberty Pups.
    • Hamburgers were transformed into “Salisbury steaks.”
    • Sauerkraut became known as “liberty cabbage.”
       

       

      Buoyed by the indisputable success of the Creel Committee and armed with the powerful psychoanalytical techniques of his Uncle Sigmund, Bernays set about to continue shaping American consciousness in a major way.

      A fine illustration of Bernays’ “smoothly functioning society” involves his efforts — for the American Tobacco Company — to persuade women to take up cigarette smoking. His slogan, “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” exploited women’s fear of gaining weight (a concern purposefully manufactured through previous advertising and/or public relations work).

      While Lucky Strike sales increased by 300 percent in the first year of Bernays’ campaign, there was still one more barrier he needed to break down: smoking remained mostly taboo for “respectable” women.

      This is where some watered-down Freud came in handy. As Bernays biographer Larry Tye said, he basically wanted to take his uncle’s works and “popularize them into little ditties that housewives and others could relate to.” With input from psychoanalyst A.A. Brill, Bernays conjured up the now legendary scheme to re-frame cigarettes as a symbol of freedom.

      “During the 1929 Easter Parade,” explains New York Times reporter Ron Chernow, “he had a troupe of fashionable ladies flounce down Fifth Avenue, conspicuously puffing their ‘Torches of Freedom,’ as he had called cigarettes.”

      As Chernow reports, Bernays augmented this successful stunt by lining up “neutral experts” to “applaud the benefits of smoking, all the while concealing the tobacco company’s sponsorship of his activity.”

      Bernays was also concealing his knowledge of tobacco’s deleterious effects. “As he hypocritically seduced American women into smoking, he was trying to wean his own wife from the nasty habit,” Chernow continues. “His daughter Anne Bernays, the novelist, recalls that whenever he discovered a pack of his wife’s Parliaments, ‘he’d pull them all out and just snap them like bones, just snap them in half and throw them in the toilet. He hated her smoking.’”

       

      It’s no wonder so many of today’s Americans — all across the ideological spectrum — are so easily and willingly duped by fake news, deep fakes, and clickbait. The system has been in place for more than a century.

      In the era of social media and a 24-hour news cycle, we are now exposed to more propaganda than ever before as Bernays’ PR progeny continue refining and honing their skills. They keep us passive, distracted, and very divided. Most Americans are thusly trapped inside news feed algorithms that serve as echo chambers to create and reinforce opinions.

      We, all of us, are the end result of an ongoing social experiment. We’ve gone from “liberty cabbage” to “flatten the curve.” We’ve surrendered the ability to discern fact from fiction. Even worse, so many of us have surrendered the desire to discern fact from fiction.

      A good place to start when challenging these realities is to accept that the past was just as corrupt as the present. There were no “good old days.” It’s not about “taking back” anything but, rather, creating something new to leave behind for future generations.

      The post Reminder: Conscious, Pervasive Manipulation and “Fake News” is NOT New first appeared on Dissident Voice.

      This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia’s Only International LGBTQ Film Festival Faces “Propaganda” Ban

    On December 5, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law that significantly expands restrictions on activities seen as promoting LGBTQ rights in the country. The bill, which calls for a “ban on LGBT propaganda” is, in essence, an effort to make LGBTQ existence illegal in Russia — not unlike similar measures in the U.S., such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill or the restrictions on…

    Source