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Category: Propaganda

  • Top Gun Maverick – A Counter-Narrative

    I saw “Top Gun: Maverick” yesterday. It was absolutely horrible. The film sets a new standard for state-orchestrated, pro-military, mass indoctrination. Goebbels, chief propagandist for Hitler’s Nazi Party, would be in awe of the shiny death plane and the spotlights and the movie star in his tuxedo.
    Tom Cruise stars as Captain Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick. In 1990, Cruise expressed misgivings about the original film when he said, “Some people felt that ‘Top Gun’ (1986) was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is. That’s why I didn’t go on and make ‘Top Gun II’ and ‘III’ and ‘IV’ and ‘V.’ That would have been irresponsible.”  – Indiewire

    That was 32 years ago. Men change their minds about things.

    The post Top Gun Maverick – A Counter-Narrative appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Intellectual Prostitutes Call Critics Foreign Agents, Useful Idiots

    A military funded academic, working at a school launched by Condoleezza Rice, claims leftist and anti-war journalists engage in Russian disinformation. His report doesn’t provide any evidence or refute anyone’s argument, but the legacy media laps it up.

    On Thursday the University of Calgary School of Public Policy released “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. With the exception of a blog by Dimitri Lascaris that dismantled its absurd ideological premises, coverage of the report was almost entirely uncritical. Headlines included: “Canada target of Russian disinformation, with tweets linked to foreign powers” (Globe and Mail), “Why is Canada the target of a Russian disinformation campaign?” (CJAD Montréal) and “Canada is target of Russian disinformation, with millions of tweets linked to Kremlin” (City News Toronto). The report’s lead author Jean-Christophe Boucher was a guest on multiple TV and radio outlets, labeling those who question the role of NATO expansion, the far Right and 2014 coup against an elected president in understanding the war in Ukraine “useful idiots” of Vladimir Putin.

    Boucher and his co-researchers claim to have mapped over six million tweets in Canada about the conflict in Ukraine. They claim over a quarter of the tweets fall into five categories they label “pro-Russian narratives”. But they don’t even attempt to justify the five categories. Instead, they simply list the most prominent commentators and political figures promoting these ideas under the rubric of “Top Russian-influenced Accounts”. The list includes leftist journalists Aaron Maté, Benjamin Norton, Max Blumenthal, Richard Medhurst and John Pilger. But no evidence is offered to connect these individuals to Russia.

    While “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media” reveals little, it has served its political purpose. It will further insulate Canadian officials from criticism of their policies by suggesting anyone questioning Ottawa’s Ukraine/NATO policies are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

    Boucher is a product of the Canadian military’s vast publicly financed ideological apparatus, which I detail in A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. He has been a fellow at the military and arms industry funded Canadian Global Affairs Institute and Dalhousie Centre for the Study of Security and Development. He advocates theories amenable to the military’s interests, including “strategic retrenchment: falling back on the people you can really trust”, which is a sophisticated way of saying Canada should deepen its alliance with the US empire. His academic profile says Boucher “is a co-lead of the Canadian Network on Information and Security, funded by the Department of National Defence” while his Canadian Global Affairs Institute bio notes that “he is currently responsible for more than $2.4M of funding from the Department of National Defence (DND) to study information operations.”

    The military put up the money to establish the Canadian Network on Information and Security (CANIS) as a joint project between the University of Calgary’s Public Policy Institute and Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. A 2020-21 DND report labels CANIS among three initiatives “launched to tackle DND/CAF’s most pressing challenges.”

    The University of Calgary School of Public Policy is essentially a right-wing think tank housed at a university, according to Donald Gutstein, author of two books on Canadian think tanks. It was set up in 2008 with $4 million from leading oil and gas lawyer James Palmer and launched at a $500-a-plate gala that included a keynote speech by George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

    The supporters of militarism would like us to believe that anyone criticizing Canada and NATO’s policies on Ukraine is a Russian agent or a useful idiot. But people being paid to promote opinions favourable to arms makers, the US empire and powerful individuals should have little credibility when it comes to criticizing the motivation of others.

    The post Intellectual Prostitutes Call Critics Foreign Agents, Useful Idiots first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Educating Journalists about Canada’s Propaganda System an Eyeopener

    Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
    —Noam Chomsky, Media Control:  The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, April 1, 1997

     Propaganda isn’t a euphemism for how the other side controls information. Nor is it simply about jailing journalists or shuttering media outlets. A serious discussion of the matter must look at the broader forces shaping information dissemination and suppression.

    On May 22 I spoke on a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference titled Censorship, Journalism and War. The Ukraine-focused exchange climaxed with journalist Justin Ling asking if I was “ashamed” for having been interviewed by RT. Nope.

    The CEO of Ethnic Channels Group, Slava Levin, launched the discussion by describing how broadcasters Rogers, Bell and Shaw summarily removed RT from their networks. As the distributor of RT and many international channels in Canada, Levin pointed out how the decision subverted the regulatory process.

    The broadcasters and Liberals indifference to the regulatory process warrants criticism but I sought to drive the discussion away from RT, Russia, China and authoritarian enemies. Even without formal restrictions, the corporate media (and CBC) permit only a narrow spectrum of opinion regarding Canadian foreign policy, as I detail in my 2016 book A Propaganda System: How Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. Various internal and external factors explain the media’s biased international coverage. Most importantly, a small number of mega corporations own most of Canada’s media and depend on other large corporations for advertising revenue. Less dependent on advertising, CBC relies on government funds and has long been close to the foreign policy establishment. All major media firms rely on easily accessible information, which is largely generated by US wire services, Global Affairs, DND, internationally focused corporations and a bevy of think tanks and academic departments tied to the military, arms industry and corporate elite. Finally, the military, foreign affairs, organized ethnic lobbies and major corporations have the power to punish media that upset them.

    In their coverage of Russia’s war with Ukraine/NATO the Canadian media and RT are the mirror image. They are exceedingly one-sided and their divergent reactions to antiwar disrupters highlight the point.

    At the panel, I contrasted the Canadian and Russian ‘propaganda systems’ reaction to my March 21 interruption of foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly on Canada’s role in escalating violence in Ukraine, opposing the Minsk peace accord and promoting NATO expansion. With the exception of a short clip by CTV News World, Canadian media outlets that covered Joly’s speech on Ukraine ignored my intervention.

    The Russian media treated the intervention differently. They portrayed me as an important author with a number of the top Russian channels inviting me on to comment. Russian media treated my disruption in a similar way to how the North American media covered Marina Ovsyannikova two weeks earlier. After she held a “no war” sign on Russia’s Channel One the western media hailed Ovsyannikova.

    I told the audience that the CBC refuses to offer vital context. Just prior to the Russian invasion I wrote about senior CBC military writer Murray Brewster, who published a slew of reports in the proceeding weeks portraying Canada/US positively and Russia negatively while failing to report information he’d previously revealed that undercuts the notion that Canada is on the side of angels in the Ukraine crisis. In 2015 Brewster revealed that the protesters who overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 were stationed in the Canadian embassy in Kyiv for a week. That year Brewster also reported that Canadian soldiers trained neo-Nazi political forces in Ukraine and in 2008 that Canada pushed Ukraine’s adhesion to NATO against Russian, French and German objections. These measures increased tensions, led to war in the east part of the Ukraine and helped precipitate Russia’s illegal invasion.

    In his intervention senior CBC international correspondent Saša Petricic described how in countries with more repressive media climates that an “atmosphere” of self-censorship develops. In response I asked who in the room had heard of the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti?

    In 2003 Canadian officials brought together top representatives of the US and French governments to discuss Haiti’s future without inviting anyone from that country’s government. According to the March 15, 2003, issue of L’Actualité (Quebec’s equivalent to Maclean’s), they discussed ousting elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, putting Haiti under UN trusteeship and re-creating the disbanded Haitian army. Thirteen months later what was discussed largely transpired yet the dominant media largely ignored the Ottawa Initiative meeting. A Canadian Newsstand search I did in 2016 while writing A Propaganda System found not one single English-language report about the meeting (except for mentions of it by me and two other Haiti solidarity activists in opinion pieces). It wasn’t until 2020 that Radio-Canada’s flagship news program “Enquête” finally reported on the meeting, interviewing the minister responsible for organizing the meeting Denis Paradis.

    What type of “atmosphere” exists in the Canadian media that would lead it to ignore this important meeting Haiti solidarity activists raised repeatedly?

    I asked the room of 30 journalists if they knew which institution has the largest public relations apparatus in the country. No one answered. The Department of National Defence/Canadian Forces (CF) has the largest PR (propaganda) machine in Canada, employing hundreds of “public relations professionals” to influence the public’s perception of the military. Last fall the military, reported the Ottawa Citizen, established “a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians.” Previously the head of CF called for the “weaponization of public affairs”, which proposed a plan to induce positive coverage and deter critical reporting. Journalists producing unflattering stories about the military were to be the target of phone calls to their boss, letters to the editor and other “flack” designed to undercut their credibility in the eyes of readers and their employers.

    The editor in chief and executive director of CBC news, Brodie Fenlon, told the room it didn’t matter that DND had the largest PR apparatus in the country since they don’t determine what’s covered. True enough. But historically the public broadcaster’s close ties to the military have made it highly deferential to the CF. According to Mallory Schwartz in War on the Air: CBC-TV and Canada’s Military, 1952-1992, “When CBC-TV produced programs that raised controversial questions about defence policy, the forces or military history, it did so with considerable care. Caution was partly a result of the special relationship between the CBC and those bodies charged with the defence of Canada.” CBC’s ties to DND sometimes translated into formal censorship. After broadcasting The Homeless Ones in 1958 Deputy Federal Civil Defence Co-ordinator Major-General George S. Hatton requested the film’s withdrawal from the NFB Library and the public broadcaster cancelled its planned rebroadcast. Hatton insisted the CBC clear all content on civil defence with his staff.

    The public broadcaster’s independence from DND has increased over the years. But since its inception the government has appointed CBC’s board and provided most of its funds.

    Another element that helps make sense of Fenlon downplaying the importance of the CF’s PR machine is his (positive) assessment of the institution. But, as I pointed out, the CF is deeply integrated with the biggest purveyor of violence the world has ever seen — US military — and Canada has only fought in one war that could even be argued was morally justifiable. Sudan, South Africa, World War I, Korea, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya were not morally justifiable wars.

    Fenlon is, of course, unlikely to have risen to a position of influence within CBC news if he shared my assessment of the Canadian military’s ties to the US Empire.

    As I was leaving the room, a young CBC journalist came over to say how much she appreciated my work. She then laughed and said she hoped her boss hadn’t heard her.

     

    The post Educating Journalists about Canada’s Propaganda System an Eyeopener first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Fractured Russian Opposition

    A conversation with Ilya Budraitskis on how the invasion of Ukraine has transformed Russian society.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • “Damned Fun”: “Top Gun: Maverick” And The Military-Entertainment Complex

    In 1990, Tom Cruise, star of the 1986 blockbuster, ‘Top Gun’, said:

    Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is – that “Top Gun” was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That’s why I didn’t go on and make “Top Gun II” and “III” and “IV” and “V.” That would have been irresponsible.

    It would indeed, and one can only admire Cruise’s honesty and selfless determination… in 1990…  not to mislead young people.

    Why, then, 32 years later, would Cruise decide to appear in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’? The Daily Mail provides a clue:

    The 59-year-old superstar was “only” paid $13million, although he will also earn a percentage of every dollar taken at the global box office. He made $100million for the original Mission: Impossible film – and could earn even more if Top Gun: Maverick is a box office smash.

    Which it is already. Associated Press reports:

    Top Gun: Maverick” has already grossed $548.6 million worldwide, making it easily one the biggest hits of Cruise’s career.

    His earlier refusal to be ‘irresponsible’ was in response to claims that Cruise’s bright, shining film was, in reality, a propaganda fecalith expelled from the bowels of ‘the Military-Entertainment Complex’. Thus, director Oliver Stone, in 1998:

    “Top Gun,” man – it was essentially a fascist movie. It sold the idea that war is clean, war can be won … nobody in the movie ever mentions that he just started World War Three!’

    In 1986, Time magazine reported that for the cost of just $1.8 million, the US Department of Defense allowed the Top Gun producers ‘the use of Miramar Naval Air Station’ as well as ‘four aircraft carriers and about two dozen F-14 Tomcats, F-5 Tigers and A-4 Skyhawks, some flown by real-life Top Gun pilots’.

    The Washington Post reports:

    It’s unlikely the film could have gotten made without the Pentagon’s considerable support. A single F-14 Tomcat cost about $38 million. The total budget for “Top Gun” was $15 million.

    It wasn’t Catch-22, but there was a catch: in exchange for this lavish military support, the producers agreed to let the US Department of Defense make changes to the script. The changes were substantial but trivial compared to the real issue missed by almost all ‘mainstream’ journalists; namely, that the US war machine would not have spent millions of dollars subsidising a movie unless the core themes of the story provided a powerful propaganda service to the US war machine. And such, indeed, was the case:

    The film conquered the box office, as well as the hearts and minds of young Americans. Following its release, applications to become Naval Aviators reportedly jumped by 500 percent. To capitalize on the craze, some enterprising Navy recruiters even set up stands outside theaters.

    Time summed it up:

    The high-flying hardware turns Top Gun into a 110-minute commercial for the Navy – and it was the Navy’s cooperation that put the planes in the picture.

    No surprise, then, as The Washington Post reported:

    Top Gun” (1986), turned out to be so influential it set the blueprint for a new kind of corporate movie product fusing Hollywood star power with the U.S. military’s firepower. Think “Black Hawk Down,” “Transformers” or “American Sniper.”

    Donald Baruch, the Pentagon’s special assistant for audio-visual media, commented that the US government ‘couldn’t buy the sort of publicity films give us’. In reality, they do, in effect, buy this publicity:

    Before a producer receives military assistance for a TV or movie project, the screenplay is reviewed by officials at the Department of Defense and by each of the services involved. The Pentagon ends up rejecting many projects that come its way on the grounds that they distort military life and situations.

    Movies critical of the military will be difficult to make,” says former Navy Lieut. John Semcken, who served as the liaison on Top Gun.

    The War Zone website provides some details behind military backing for the new, follow-up film, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’:

    The War Zone obtained the official production assistance agreements, 84 pages in total, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Office of the Secretary of Defense…

    The documents confirm that filming was conducted on location at Naval Base Coronado, Naval Air Station (NAS) Fallon, NAS Lemoore, Naval Air Facility (NAF) El Centro, Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake, and Naval Air Station (NAS) Whidbey Island. Fallon is home to the Navy’s real-life Topgun program.’

    How many aircraft carriers were thrown in?

    The Nimitz class aircraft carriers USS Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt were also made available. Some filming even took place inside Roosevelt’s Combat Direction Center, which is the ship’s nerve center.

    The War Zone adds:

    Two different agreements say that the Navy was expected to provide between four and 12 actual F/A-18 fighters for film, “dependent on availability of aircraft.” There is at least one scene in the trailers that have been released so far showing a row of these jets, including one wearing a special paint job created specifically for the movie.

    In addition, the Navy was to “allow for the internal and external placement of the Production Company’s cameras on F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and Navy helicopters with the approval of the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR).

    And:

    There are some details about set construction in various locations, including the complete transformation of a hangar and squadron spaces belonging to Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 30 (VRC-30) at NAS North Island, part of Naval Base Coronado, for the movie.

    While the recent, 75th Cannes film festival banned any official delegations or reporters from Russia, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ was massively promoted. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the gala opening of the festival on a huge screen via a video link from Kyiv. Drawing heavily on Charlie Chaplin’s classic film, The Great Dictator (1940), Zelensky said:

    If there is a dictator, if there is a war for freedom, once again, everything depends on our unity. Can cinema stay outside of this unity?

    Quoting directly from Chaplin’s anti-war speech at the end of the film, Zelensky said:

    In the end, hatred will disappear and dictators will die.

    On The World Socialist Website, Stefan Steinberg responded:

    The Ukrainian president’s duplicitous speech was then given a standing ovation by the well-heeled audience of film celebrities, super-models, media figures and critics gathered at the festival’s Grand Théâtre Lumière…

    Zelensky, whose government’s promotion of unfettered free market capitalism and extreme nationalism includes full support for the notorious fascist Azov battalion, and his US-NATO backers stand for everything that Chaplin abhorred. In fact, what would a Chaplin make out of the self-satisfied rubbish about “poor, defenseless little Ukraine,” armed to the hilt and financed by the biggest imperialist robbers on the planet?

    The Independent reports that the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ film has come at just the right time:

    In April, state senators were told how the US army faced a “war for talent” amid shrinking battalion numbers, echoing admissions from air force officials that its own pool of qualified candidates had fallen by half since the beginning of Covid. Things haven’t looked rosy for the navy either, which declared in February that it was 5,000 to 6,000 sailors short at sea. ..

    Little wonder, then, that Uncle Sam once again welcomed Paramount Pictures with open arms for Maverick, granting director Joseph Kosinski and his crew all-access passes to highly sensitive naval facilities, including a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. World-class technicians provided cast members with top-level fighter pilot training right down to seat ejection…

    Happily, press reports inform us:

    The US Navy is [again] setting up “recruiting stations” in cinema foyers across America. After the first film there was a 50 per cent increase in applications to join the Navy’s fighter programme. A spokesman said: “Obviously we are hoping for the same outcome this time around.”

    If any readers notice any journalists asking Tom Cruise if he still wants ‘the kids to know that’s not the way war is’, that ‘Top Gun’ is just an amusement park ride’ that is ‘not supposed to be reality’, and that it would be ‘irresponsible’ to make ‘Top Gun III’ and ‘IV’ and ‘V’ – do let us know (gro.snelaidemnull@rotide).

    The Guardian’s Mark Kermode – ‘I Give Up’

    Given the military involvement in both ‘Top Gun’ films and the massive impact of the first film on US military recruitment, a natural concern for anyone reviewing the new film would seem to be the role of the US military since 1986.

    A really salient fact about the world since the mid-eighties, as we all know – as our newspaper front pages, echoing ‘Top Gun’ heroics, never tire of telling us – is that the US has been relentlessly bombing countries like Serbia, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan ever since. In 2015, a study by Physicians for Global Responsibility reported:

    The purpose of this investigation is to provide as realistic an estimate as possible of the total body count in the three main war zones Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan during 12 years of “war on terrorism”. An extensive review has been made of the major studies and data published on the numbers of victims in these countries… This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.

    Of course, even these vast numbers omit the untold carnage inflicted by the US military between 1986-2001, and since 2015, but they do give an idea of what ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ and its admirers are actually celebrating.

    In the Guardian, film critic Mark Kermode supplied a summary of the plot:

    Maverick has in fact been called back to the Top Gun programme – not to fly, but to teach the “best of the best” how to blow up a uranium enrichment plant at face-melting velocity, a mission that will require not one but “two consecutive miracles”.’

    As we know, ‘Real men go to Tehran’ – and Iran clearly is ‘the enemy’ here. The Independent acknowledged as much in noting that the US navy was given script approval:

    This might also explain why Top Gun: Maverick never goes into detail about its villains – instead, audiences are simply informed that “the enemy” is a rogue state hellbent on uranium enrichment. Let’s assume it rhymes with “Diran”.

    When Iran is bombed in real life, Westerners will cheer because they’ll think they’re watching their movie heroes annihilating The Bad Guys. When ‘the best of the best’ move on to trash the whole country, the public will have been so brainwashed, so desensitised, they will rate the ‘action’ on a par with something they saw on the silver screen. The same thing happened during the Gulf War that began in January 1991. One of us saw a spoof ‘Iraqi calendar’ behind the bar of an English pub, which showed the year ending for Iraq on January 16, the date the US-UK attack was launched.

    When the state-corporate culture of a highly aggressive imperial power produces war films that deliberately blend fiction and reality, there are real-world consequences. Actual high-tech death and destruction are made to seem ‘cool’, ‘fun’ – an impact that no serious reviewer can ignore. Assuming, that is, we reject the idea that a review in a corporate viewspaper is mere ‘entertainment’ that has nothing to do with the real world it so clearly impacts. Assuming, further, that we reject the idea that we should function as passive, apolitical, amoral consumers manipulated by powerful elites who are not themselves passive or apolitical at all, but who work relentlessly to extend their influence, wealth and power.

    As though spoofing, Kermode concluded his review:

    Personally, I found myself powerless to resist; overawed by the “real flight” aeronautics and nail-biting sky dances, bludgeoned by the sugar-frosted glow of Cruise’s mercilessly engaging facial muscles, and shamefully brought to tears by moments of hate-yourself-for-going-with-it manipulation. In the immortal words of Abba’s Waterloo, “I was defeated, you won the war”. I give up.

    Kermode gave up. In reality, the outcome of his personal ‘Waterloo’ was never in doubt. As Noam Chomsky famously told the BBC’s Andrew Marr:

    … if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.

    Kermode’s review bowed down to an intellectually and morally castrated version of what it means to be a film critic, one that casually waves away the appalling, real-world impact of propaganda efforts like ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. It’s a version of film criticism that just happens – ‘My, my!’ – to align itself with the agenda of the consistently pro-war Guardian newspaper and wider corporate media system that makes him wealthy and famous for the back-breaking task of writing a few clever, filtered words every week.

    In the Telegraph, Boris Starling managed to recall some military history:

    Since then [“Top Gun”, 1986] we have had two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, 9/11, Syria, and of course the current Russian invasion of Ukraine – all of which have, one way or another, dented the concept of unfettered American military might.’

    Clearly, Nato’s devastation of Libya – executed with the assistance of more than a dozen US navy ships and a similar number of aircraft – never happened.

    Starling’s distorted vision of history reminds us of the BBC’s unfortunate animated web article: ‘The Incredible Change The Queen Has Seen’. Reviewing major international political events since 1952, the BBC comments:

    Russia invades Ukraine twice, bringing it into conflict with the West once again.

    According to the BBC, then, no-one spread death and destruction in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Libya, Syria… on and on. The BBC piece concludes:

    Happy Jubilee Ma’am

    The fact, as we have discussed, that the West got its hands on both Iraqi and Libyan oil challenges Starling’s idea that ‘unfettered American military might’ has been ‘dented’.

    In a parallel universe, a film critic might have reflected on whether the vast death toll from US wars has ‘dented’ the ethical status of films like ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Top Gun: Maverick’. Instead, Starling noticed a different problem with the new film:

    But at a time when a real conflict with unimaginable casualties and featuring medieval levels of brutality is taking place on NATO’s border – a conflict into which the US is still refusing to countenance direct military intervention – Top Gun: Maverick may be construed in certain quarters as borderline tasteless.

    In other words, the problem with the ‘Top Gun’ franchise is not that the US military machine has been blitzing the world before and since 1986. The problem is that, after all that good work, it is refusing to ‘countenance direct military intervention’ in Ukraine – having merely sent $60 billion in ‘aid’, most of it military – making the latest ‘Top Gun’ heroics somewhat embarrassing. This is what passes for ‘mainstream’ ethical discussion in our high-tech, neon-lit dark age.

    Another piece by the Telegraph’s chief film critic, Robbie Collin, notes:

    The assignment involves neutralising a uranium enrichment plant somewhere overseas, though we’re told details about the enemy regime behind it are “scarce” – as they have to be these days when you’re trying to sell a blockbuster into as many overseas markets as possible.

    Presumably, any Iranians wishing to see the film will be too dumb to realise what is blindingly obvious to everyone else:

    Certain military details suggest it might be Iran, but it doesn’t matter either way: the film is low on militaristic swagger, and instead focuses on Maverick’s missionary-like determination to have these youngsters not just reach their potential but surpass it, with the help of their extraordinary aircraft.

    Yes, who cares? We all know it’s Iran; so what if that background awareness makes it easier for the public to applaud when Iran receives a generous dose of ‘humanitarian intervention’? Collin concluded by heaping praise on ‘this absurdly entertaining film’.

    And that’s all that matters – it’s ‘entertaining’. It’s also somehow ‘low on militaristic swagger’, despite being jam-packed with gleaming warplanes, aircraft carriers and military uniforms. Needless to say, it wouldn’t have mattered how ‘absurdly entertaining’ the film was, if it had depicted Iranian or Russian pilots heroically preparing to bomb the US.

    In the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab’s article did manage to reference some history, but only in the sense suggested by the title: ‘Why Tom Cruise’s latest thrill ride is a take-off of traditional Hollywood flying movies’:

    These films have a poetical dimension you don’t find in conventional earthbound war movies. Their protagonists are young and courageous, performing their own ethereal, Icarus-like dances with death. They’re fighting as much against the elements as against their enemies.

    Again, no concern for the front-page carnage inflicted year after year.

    Also in the Independent, Clarisse Loughrey supplied the standard, faux-feminist ‘dissent’, commenting on the new film’s compassionate treatment of its male characters :

    The film, unfortunately, doesn’t extend as much of a loving hand toward the women of Top Gun – neither McGillis nor Meg Ryan, who played Rooster’s mother, make any kind of return.

    But this shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the party:

    Again, there’ll come a time when we need to talk about why Hollywood only accepts older women who look a certain way. Until then, who can be blamed for getting swept up by a film this damned fun?

    In the Daily Mail, Jan Moir noted Cruise’s fearlessness in performing his own stunts, adding:

    But there is one thing this Hollywood hero is scared of – old ladies! That’s where he draws the line – at the genuine and the realistic. And that is his biggest crime of all in my book… where are the women from the 1986 original? Excuse me. Simply nowhere to be seen. Vaporised by the Hollywood Age Patrol, the girls have somehow fallen off their perch and simply ceased to be.

    There is one thing that Moir, like essentially all of corporate journalism, is scared of – the dead, injured, grieving and displaced victims of the West’s endless wars of aggression. The victims are not allowed to exist or matter. They’re not allowed to spoil the celebration of this ‘damned fun’, of the state-corporate fundamentalist faith that ‘we’ are The Good Guys.

    But anyway, is it really such ‘damned fun’? Somehow managing to defy the corporate hypegeist, A.O. Scott of the New York Times writes of the new film’s characters: ‘the world they inhabit is textureless and generic’, ‘the dramatic stakes seem curiously low’, the movie is ‘bland and basic’. Scott’s conclusion:

    Though you may hear otherwise, “Top Gun: Maverick” is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie.

    The post “Damned Fun”: “Top Gun: Maverick” And The Military-Entertainment Complex first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Conspiracy?

    The post Conspiracy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • People Who Defend Empire Narratives Are Really Just Defending Their Worldview From Destruction

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you’ve publicly challenged the official narratives of the western political/media class about any major issue, you’ve probably noticed that people can get pretty upset about it.

    Like, actually upset. Not mildly annoyed like you might get at someone who is saying something that is obviously false and stupid, but burning hot emotional like you’d get if you heard someone insulting your loved one. Or like someone insulting you personally.

    That’s the most surprising thing, when you first start speaking about this stuff. Not that people don’t believe you or don’t agree with you; that’s to be expected when every screen in their lives is telling them one thing and you’re telling them something else. But that people actually get deeply emotionally invested in it.

    That’s your first clue that there’s something else going on beneath the surface apart from what you’re being presented with. You’re not just arguing about Ukraine or China or Syria or whatever, you’re touching on a psychological third rail that’s being ferociously protected.

    Many of the people you’ll run into online or in person who defend imperial narratives from your criticisms aren’t doing so because they believe the US-centralized empire is awesome and great, they’re doing so because it’s much more comfortable than confronting the possibility that their entire worldview is made of lies.

    There’s a great comic by The Oatmeal which explains the psychological defense mechanisms humans have in place to protect their worldview from information that could destabilize it. Because of our tendency to select for cognitive ease over cognitive challenge in order to conserve mental energy, we tend to be heavily biased against consciously helping new worldview-disrupting information get past those psychological defense mechanisms.

    And it doesn’t get more worldview-disrupting than questioning mainstream consensus reality. Because on the other side of that investigation is the realization that pretty much everything you’ve been trained to believe about your society, your nation, your government and your world, is a lie.

    This is often what people are really pushing back against when they get upset at someone who is being critical of official empire narratives. It’s not actually super important to them that everyone believe the correct things about their government or someone else’s government, it’s super important to them that the world as they know it not come to a crashing halt.

    Because that’s what it is, as far as their experience and perception is concerned. A lucid seeing that their entire worldview is based on lies would feel like the end of their world, because in their experience it would be the end of the world they know.

    Having your entire understanding of the world and how it works torn asunder is a kind of a death, because it’s the end of your secure knowing of what’s real. In a sense it’s the end of you, too. It’s the end of the person you were. It’s all illusory of course, but that’s the way it feels.

    If you ask someone to consider the possibility that they’re being lied to in some way about Ukraine, for example, you’re not just asking them to unravel one small belief about one specific conflict. You’re asking them to ask questions that open up other questions, the answers to which could very easily end up unravelling their entire understanding of their whole world.

    Think about it. If you consider the possibility that the news media and their government are lying about Ukraine, you must necessarily consider the possibility that they’re lying about other things, too. And if they’re lying about all that, it would mean you were taught lies in school, too. And if you’ve been consuming lies from the very beginning of your education, that means your entire understanding of how everything works is built on lies, which means your political ideology and many opinions you hold probably are, too.

    If you really think about what this kind of confrontation means for the individual, is it any wonder that most people fight tooth and claw against the suggestion that they should even begin to enter that investigative rabbit hole?

    I mean, think about how it was for you. If you’re reading this, odds are you went through the ordeal of worldview dissolution yourself at some point. Can you honestly say it was easy? Or entirely pleasant?

    This is not easy to do. You cast aside the comforts of knowledge and understanding, and then after you’ve gone through that whole ordeal you’re still not out of the woods, because until you’ve gotten your bearings you can find yourself in a kind of epistemological no-man’s land where anything might be true. In that space people can get mixed up and latch onto new worldviews that are no more truth-based than the one they abandoned, like QAnon or fuzzbrained notions about Jews ruling the world. It’s not until you pass through the process of abandoning all the falsehoods and the process of learning what’s really true that you begin to regain any semblance of stability.

    If you think that’s an easy thing to do, it’s probably because you haven’t gone through it yourself.

    Can you really blame people for intuitively pushing away from that?

    It’s actually much, much easier to go from being a die-hard Democrat to a die-hard Republican or vice-versa than it is to fully relinquish the mainstream consensus reality, because those partisan narratives both exist within the mainstream consensus reality. The entire conceptual infrastructure by which they exist is the same: a world where the US and its allies are acting in good faith against tyrannical regimes in nations like Russia and China, where capitalism is totally working, where democracy is real, and where you can turn on a TV news station and see someone saying something trustworthy about these things. You’re still playing the same game, you just switched teams.

    To really see through all the lies is for the floor to fall out from the game altogether and for the roof to be ripped off the stadium. It’s to see the entire conceptual infrastructure upon which mainstream politics plays out crumble to dust, to see the lights switched on and the puppet theater reduced to atoms, leaving only the puppeteers waving their stupid toys and talking in silly voices.

    Depending on how attached you are to the feeling of security your worldview gives you and how resistant you are to letting it go, really confronting the lies our society is woven from can be one of the most difficult things you ever do. It’s a long, deep process of untangling which, if followed all the way through, eventually leads to the dissolution of entire belief systems, and ultimately even entire identity structures. Followed all the way through, it can lead to the very end of who you take yourself to be and your experience of what you are.

    So have patience if people don’t see what you see. They’re just afraid. They’re not there yet. An acorn is not a defective oak tree. An egg is not a defective chicken. We’re all waking up together, and some of us have had to be the first to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light. This is just what it looks like as life on this planet moves toward increased levels of complexity and consciousness.

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Rape Allegations Against Russian Troops In Ukraine Were Fake

    There is a first and still very low noise signal that the Zelenski regime in Kiev is coming apart.

    Six weeks ago there were suddenly many claims that Russian soldiers in Ukraine had raped people.

    Time headlined: Ukrainians Who Have Been Raped by Russian Troops Are Refusing to Stay Silent

    Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Lyudmyla Denisova said that 25 teenage girls were kept in a basement in Bucha and gang-raped; nine of them are now pregnant. Elderly women spoke on camera about being raped by Russian soldiers. The bodies of children were found naked with their hands tied behind their backs, their genitals mutilated. Those victims included both girls and boys, and Ukrainian men and boys have been sexually assaulted in other incidents. A group of Ukrainian women POWs had their heads shaved in Russian captivity, where they were also stripped naked and forced to squat.

    The post Rape Allegations Against Russian Troops In Ukraine Were Fake appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Ukrainian Official Behind Western Media Reports Of Russian Atrocities Fired By Ukrainian Parliament

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    A Ukrainian government official frequently cited as a source by western news media for her allegations of atrocities committed by Russian troops has been fired by the Ukrainian parliament, in part because of the unevidenced nature of those claims.

    Newsweek reports:

    A Ukrainian official has been relieved of her duties over her handling of reports detailing sexual assault allegations made against Russians in Ukraine.

     

    On Tuesday, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, removed Lyudmila Denisova, the parliament’s commissioner for human rights, from her post, according to Ukrainska Pravda. No new appointment has been made to fill the role.

     

    The move to dismiss Denisova came after outrage about the wording used in public reports about alleged sexual assaults committed by Russians, as well as the alleged dissemination in those reports of unverified information. Despite accusations from Ukraine, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied that Russian soldiers have committed war crimes or sexual assaults during the invasion.

    As it happens, Newsweek is one of the many western outlets who have uncritically cited Denisova’s unevidenced claims in their reporting of events in Ukraine. She was the “Ukraine official” in Newsweek’s incendiary April headline “Russians Raped 11-Year-Old Boy, Forced Mom to Watch: Ukraine Official,” an article whose entire first half featured unevidenced claims by Denisova.

    Denisova’s name featured just the other day in my own critique of the western media’s blind-faith regurgitation of Ukrainian government assertions when multiple western media outlets parroted her unevidenced claims about two Russians raping a one year-old baby to death.

    Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail, The Sun, Metro, The Daily Mirror and Yahoo News all published reports on the same story, and the one and only source for all of them was a post made by Denisova on a Ukrainian government website which contained no evidence and concluded with a call for more weapons and sanctions against Russia from the western world.

    Moon of Alabama has compiled other western news media reports which have been uncritically regurgitating claims made by Denisova and disguising those claims as news stories, like Business Insider’s “Ukraine says it received more than 400 reports of sexual violence, including rape, by Russian soldiers within 2 weeks” and Time’s “Ukrainians Are Speaking Up About Rape as a War Crime to Ensure the World Holds Russia Accountable.”

    This is not just brazen journalistic malpractice, this is actual atrocity propaganda. This latest development shows that even the Ukrainian government is more skeptical of Ukrainian government claims than the western mainstream press.

    _____________________

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

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  • Empire Solves Ukraine’s Nazi Problem With A Logo Change

    Listen to a reading of this article:

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    Ahh, that’s much better. Problem solved.

    British empire smut rag The Times has a new article out titled “Azov Battalion drops neo-Nazi symbol exploited by Russian propagandists,” which has got to be the most hilarious headline of 2022 so far (and I’m including The Onion and other intentionally funny headlines in the running).

    “The Azov Battalion has removed a neo-Nazi symbol from its insignia that has helped perpetuate Russian propaganda about Ukraine being in the grip of far-right nationalism,” The Times informs us. “At the unveiling of a new special forces unit in Kharkiv, patches handed to soldiers did not feature the wolfsangel, a medieval German symbol that was adopted by the Nazis and which has been used by the battalion since 2014. Instead, they featured a golden trident, the Ukrainian national symbol worn by other regiments.”

    Yeah that’s how you solve Ukraine’s Nazi problem. A logo change.

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    BREAKING: Ukrainian Nazis are getting rid of their SS symbols to stop evil propagandists in one of the smartest marketing moves ever. The Times headline tells how much Western oligarchs support fascists. 🇺🇦✋ pic.twitter.com/ITV7TFWA6F

    — taseenov (@taseenb) May 30, 2022

    Claiming it’s “Russian propaganda” to say the Azov Battalion uses neo-Nazi insignia, and is ideologically neo-Nazi, is itself propaganda. A month ago Moon of Alabama published an incomplete list of the many mainstream western outlets who have described various Ukrainian paramilitaries as such, so if it’s only “Russian propagandists” who’ve been saying the Azov Battalion is neo-Nazi then Silicon Valley social media platforms should immediately ban outlets like NBC News, the BBC, The Guardian, and Reuters.

    Before this war started this past February it wasn’t seriously controversial to say that Ukraine has a Nazi problem except in the very most virulent of empire spinmeister echo chambers. Even in the early days of the conflict it was still happening with mainstream publications who hadn’t yet gotten the memo that history had been rewritten, like this NBC News article from March titled “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”

    An excerpt:

    Just as disturbing, neo-Nazis are part of some of Ukraine’s growing ranks of volunteer battalions. They are battle-hardened after waging some of the toughest street fighting against Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine following Putin’s Crimean invasion in 2014. One is the Azov Battalion, founded by an avowed white supremacist who claimed Ukraine’s national purpose was to rid the country of Jews and other inferior races. In 2018, the U.S. Congress stipulated that its aid to Ukraine couldn’t be used “to provide arms, training or other assistance to the Azov Battalion.” Even so, Azov is now an official member of the Ukraine National Guard.

    So plainly it is not “Russian propaganda” to highlight the established fact that there are neo-Nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine who are receiving weapons from the US and its allies. The change in insignia isn’t being made to correct a misperception, it’s being made to obscure a correct perception.

    The change in insignia is a rebranding to a more mainstream-friendly logo, very much like Aunt Jemima rebranding to Pearl Milling Company due to the Jim Crow racism the previous branding evoked. The primary difference is that the corporate executives of Pearl Milling probably aren’t still interested in turning America back into an apartheid state.

    As journalist Alex Rubenstein noted on Twitter, al Qaeda in Syria went through a similar rebranding not long ago for the exact same reasons:

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    Azov is the new al-Qaeda in Syria: "We aren't al-Qaeda! We split from them. Sure, all of us are former members but our new group, Jaysh al-Zawahiri, isn't down with that sort of thing! We still fly the black flag but changed the words on it. Now please us send more weapons." https://t.co/coh8mZPNLQ

    — Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) May 30, 2022

    Indeed it is very normal for the US and its allies to provide backing to fascistic extremists in order to advance imperial agendas, because those tend to be the armed factions in a given area who are willing to inflict the brutal acts of violence upon their countrymen necessary to facilitate those agendas.

    From far right militias in Latin America to tyrannical jihadists in the Middle East, this pattern of backing murderous fascists and then having to manage public perception of their depravity has been going on a long time. After the US alliance began working with al Qaeda-aligned factions to push regime change Syria, it eventually became necessary for them to rebrand to appease public concerns about their image. When the US-backed Contras were committing human rights atrocities in Nicaragua to stomp out the leftist Sandinistas, the Reagan administration was launching a massive perception management campaign to manipulate the way people see the situation.

    In Ukraine, neo-Nazi paramilitaries just happen to have been the armed thugs who were depraved enough to do what the empire needed done on the ground. As Ukrainian-American peace activist Yuliy Dubovyk explained for Multipolarista, they were the ones who were willing to fire upon their own countrymen in eastern part of the nation.

    The people in Donetsk and Luhansk were less lucky. The coup government dispatched the military to suppress their insurrections.

     

    At first many Ukrainian soldiers refused to shoot at their own countrymen, in this civil war that their US-backed government started.

     

    Seeing the hesitation of the Ukrainian military, far-right groups (and the oligarchs that were backing them) formed so-called “territorial defense battalions,” with names like Azov, Aidar, Dnipro, Tornado, etc.

     

    Much like in Latin America, where US-backed death-squads kill left-wing politicians, socialists, and labor organizers, these Ukrainian fascist battalions were deployed to lead the offensive against the militias of Donetsk and Luhansk, killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

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    Unlocked: Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's historic mandate for peace, by @aaronjmate https://t.co/3rYOdIcob2

    — Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) April 15, 2022

    The fact that factions like the Azov Battalion have been the ones willing to get their hands dirty in Ukraine has been a major factor in their ability to shore up influence over the nation’s affairs far in excess of their numbers, a dynamic described in detail by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubenstein. As noted by journalist Aaron Maté, when Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine these extremists openly threatened to lynch him if he worked to make peace with Russia as he had pledged to do.

    And on that note it’s work issuing another reminder at this time that the US could easily have prevented this entire war by simply giving Zelensky protection from those factions so that he could enact the peace mandate he’d been elected to enact. But of course the US would never do such a thing, because the US always wanted this war, and because the US does not actually believe in democratic mandates, and because the US does not actually oppose Nazism.

    Which is why when concerns were raised about arming neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, the only offer on the table was a logo 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, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Ten Times Empire Managers Showed Us That They Want To Control Our Thoughts

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    The single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society is the fact that immensely powerful people are continuously working to manipulate the thoughts we think about the world. Whether you call it propaganda, psyops, perception management or public relations, it’s a real thing that happens constantly, and it happens to all of us.

    And its consequences shape our entire world.

    This should be at the forefront of our attention when examining news, trends and ideas, but it hardly ever gets mentioned. This is because the mass-scale psychological manipulation is succeeding. Propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening.

    To be clear, I am not talking about some kind of wacky unsubstantiated conspiracy theory here. I am talking about a conspiracy fact. That we are propagandized by people with authority over us is not seriously in dispute by any good-faith actor and has been extensively described and documented for many years.

    More than this, the managers of the US-centralized empire which dominates the west and so much of the rest of the world have straightforwardly shown us that they propagandize us and want to propagandize us more. They have shown us with their actions, and they have at times come right out and told us with their words.

    Here are just a few of those times.

    1. Operation Mockingbird

    Let’s start with maybe the best-known example. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.

    It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

    But it only got worse from there.

    2. Intelligence operatives now just openly working in the media

    Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and people are too propagandized to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The Washington Post has consistently refused to disclose the fact that its sole owner has been a CIA contractor when reporting on US intelligence agencies as per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona, Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Mike Rogers and Malcolm Nance, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

    Operation Mockingbird was the CIA doing something to the media. What we are seeing now is the CIA openly acting as the media. Any meaningful separation between the CIA and the news media, indeed even any pretence of separation, has been dropped.

    3. Richard Stengel’s CFR remarks on propaganda

    Former US State Department official and Time Magazine editor Richard Stengel expressed full-throated support for the use of propaganda on both foreign and domestic audiences during a 2018 event organized by the supremely influential think tank Council on Foreign Relations.

    “Basically every country creates their own narrative story,” Stengel said. “My old job at the State Department was what people used to joke as the chief propagandist. I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it, and they have to do it to their own population. And I don’t necessarily think it’s that awful.”

    Interestingly, years earlier during his time at the US State Department under the Obama administration Stengel actually provided his own definition of what precisely he means by the word “propaganda”, and it’s not nearly as innocuous as he made it sound for his CFR audience.

    “Propaganda is the deliberate dissemination of information that you know to be false or misleading in order to influence an audience,” Stengel wrote in 2014.

    Those are two mighty interesting positions for an empire manager to hold at the same time, especially one who just served on the presidential transition team of the current president.

    4. US officials telling the press they’re circulating disinfo about Russia to win an information war against Putin

    Last month NBC News released a report citing multiple anonymous US officials who said the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.

    The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.

    So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.

    That this happened while the mass media is continually churning out reports warning the public about the dangers of “disinformation” is an irony that was lost on almost everybody.

    5. Senators telling Silicon Valley representatives it’s their job to manipulate public thought to prevent dissent

    In 2017 representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and told they must “quell information rebellions” and were instructed to come up with a mission statement expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord” on their platforms.

    “We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the tech giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

    When monopolistic billionaire corporations are faced with demands from a legislative body that could easily make their lives a lot harder and a lot less profitable by taking action, up to and including major antitrust cases, they are being made an offer they can’t refuse. This was made abundantly clear by Senator Dianne Feinstein during the 2017 hearings in her threat to intervene if those corporations failed to curtail the spread of unauthorized information online.

    “You have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will,” Feinstein told the online platforms.

    6. The Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board”

    The Department of Homeland Security’s hotly controversial Disinformation Governance Board, which critics have not-unfairly labeled a government-run Ministry of Truth, has “paused” its operations pending a review in light of public outcry. That review will be headed by corrupt imperial swamp monsters Michael Chertoff and Jamie Gorelick, of all people.

    No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

    Whatever happens with that review we may be sure that the board’s mission will continue, either under its current name or under some other more carefully disguised iteration. The empire is expressing far too much enthusiasm for greater and greater control over public thought to just let this one slip past.

    7. The Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012

    In December of 2012 the US congress passed a revision of the Smith-Mundt Act as part of the 2013 NDAA which critics said ended restrictions that were put in place to prevent the government from propagandizing US citizens.

    The legislation was first highlighted in a BuzzFeed News article by journalist Michael Hastings, who the following year would die in a rather suspicious car wreck while reportedly working on a major story.

    “It removes the protection for Americans,” an unnamed Pentagon official told Hastings. “It removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

    Hastings’ report sparked online controversy, with many agreeing with his analysis of what would become known as the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 and others saying concerns were unfounded. Either way, with all that’s happened over the last ten years, it’s clear now that Americans were right to be worried about a dramatic escalation in domestic propaganda.

    8. Reagan’s Psychological Operations

    The late Robert Parry wrote numerous articles for Consortium News about the Reagan administration’s operations of mass-scale psychological manipulation, which related directly to Parry’s extensive work on the Iran-Contra affair during that time.

    Parry described how Reagan and his neocon goons were obsessed with countering the public war-weariness and distrust of US interventionism which followed the Vietnam War in order to gain more public consent for the depraved agendas the administration was working to roll out in Latin America. Central to this goal of consent-manufacturing, which the White House called “public diplomacy” in public and “perception management” in private, was a particularly odious-sounding spook named Walter Raymond Jr.

    In an article titled “The Victory of ‘Perception Management’,” Parry wrote the following:

    During his Iran-Contra deposition, Raymond explained the need for this propaganda structure, saying: “We were not configured effectively to deal with the war of ideas.”

     

    One reason for this shortcoming was that federal law forbade taxpayers’ money from being spent on domestic propaganda or grassroots lobbying to pressure congressional representatives. Of course, every president and his team had vast resources to make their case in public, but by tradition and law, they were restricted to speeches, testimony and one-on-one persuasion of lawmakers.

     

    But things were about to change. In a Jan. 13, 1983, memo, NSC Advisor Clark foresaw the need for non-governmental money to advance this cause. “We will develop a scenario for obtaining private funding,” Clark wrote. (Just five days later, President Reagan personally welcomed media magnate Rupert Murdoch into the Oval Office for a private meeting, according to records on file at the Reagan library.)

     

    As administration officials reached out to wealthy supporters, lines against domestic propaganda soon were crossed as the operation took aim not only at foreign audiences but at U.S. public opinion, the press and congressional Democrats who opposed funding the Nicaraguan Contras.

    9. Canadian military leaders using Covid regulations as an opportunity to test out psyop techniques on civilians

    Last year Ottawa Citizen reported that the Canadian military used the Covid outbreak as an excuse to test actual military psyop techniques on its own civilian population under the pretense of assuring compliance with pandemic restrictions.

    Some excerpts:

    • “Canadian military leaders saw the pandemic as a unique opportunity to test out propaganda techniques on an unsuspecting public, a newly released Canadian Forces report concludes.”
    • “The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for ‘shaping’ and ‘exploiting’ information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”
    • “A separate initiative, not linked to the CJOC plan, but overseen by Canadian Forces intelligence officers, culled information from public social media accounts in Ontario. Data was also compiled on peaceful Black Lives Matter gatherings and BLM leaders.”
    • “’This is really a learning opportunity for all of us and a chance to start getting information operations into our (CAF-DND) routine,’ the rear admiral stated.”
    • “Yet another review centred on the Canadian Forces public affairs branch and its activities. Last year, the branch launched a controversial plan that would have allowed military public affairs officers to use propaganda to change attitudes and behaviours of Canadians as well as to collect and analyze information from public social media accounts.”
    • “The plan would have seen staff move from traditional government methods of communicating with the public to a more aggressive strategy of using information warfare and influence tactics on Canadians.”

    So empire managers are not just employing mass-scale psychological operations on the public, they’re testing them and learning from them.

    10. The US government funding “independent” media in Ukraine

    Lastly, there’s the fact that the infamous $40 billion proxy war package sent to Ukraine includes funds allocated to “Counter Russian disinformation and propaganda narratives, promote accountability for Russian human rights violation, and support activists, journalists, and independent media to defend freedom of expression.”

    So information warfare. The US government is funding information warfare to manipulate public perception of this war and running cover for those manipulations by calling them activism, journalism, and independent media.

    Given that the mainstream western press have been uncritically reporting even the most outlandish stories coming out of Ukraine without a shred of evidence, we can expect this government-funded propaganda to spread throughout the western world.

    _________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • How “virtual crime scenes” became a propaganda tool in Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria

    This article shows how media uses computer modeling and “virtual crime scenes” to assign blame for some extremely important international events. In these examples from Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria, many people died in complex circumstances. The deaths at the “Mother’s March” in Managua, Nicaragua precipitated an attempted coup.  The Maidan Massacre in Kyiv led to an actual coup. The claims of a chemical attack in Douma led to the US, France and the UK bombing Syria.

    The three incidents are in different continents but share some key characteristics: each is to some degree emblematic of the conflict of which it is part, cited as an important indicator of who is right and who is wrong. All three violent incidents are controversial, with both “sides” claiming to be right. Creating “virtual crime scenes” is a tool which enables establishment media such as the New York Times, the BBC or (in Spain) El Pais, to convey interpretations of the events which conveniently coincide with the way they are seen by the US government and its allies.

    All three events have been described and analyzed elsewhere. Here we describe them briefly and then discuss how the “virtual crime scenes” were developed, what their conclusions were and why they are at best questionable and at worst completely mistaken.

    Managua, Nicaragua, 30 May 2018

    In April 2018, demonstrations sprang up against Daniel Ortega’s government and they quickly turned violent: demonstrators attacked police and vice versa. A “national dialogue” began in early May but, despite this, the violence became worse. Large numbers took part in demonstrations which were mainly peaceful, but with violent outbreaks at the fringes or after most participants had gone home. Large pro- and anti-government marches were planned for Managua on May 30, Mother’s Day.  Authorities set the routes to keep them apart. Despite police efforts, at the end of the opposition march, violent groups headed towards the rival demonstration. In the resultant clashes two pro-government marchers and seven anti-government protesters were killed, while 20 police were injured and there were two deaths among bystanders.

    Protesters at a Managua roadblock, 30 May 2018 (SITU Research)

    Two years after this day of violence, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), through its Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI, for its initials in Spanish) published a reconstruction of a “virtual crime scene,” focused on the deaths of three protesters. It was produced for the GIEI by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)  and SITU Research of New York. The “forensic” examination was aimed at finding the likely culprits in the killings, which took place at a roadblock put in place by the protesters, close to Managua’s national baseball stadium. A website shows the evidence collected, including two specialist firearms reports, although access to the full video event reconstruction has recently been blocked and only clips are shown. The video acknowledges the lack of conclusive evidence but argues that “circumstantial evidence” overwhelmingly suggests that armed police officers or Sandinista supporters indiscriminately killed the three protesters and others shot dead in related incidents.

    A detailed critique of the reconstruction was published by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA). This showed fundamental errors and gaps in the SITU/EAAF work. The most important were:

    • A map which is key to the video shows the position of a group of police who were alleged to have fired the fatal shots. But it was incorrectly drawn: it placed them at the center of the zone from which the firearms expert judged the shots to have originated, whereas, in fact, their true location was outside that zone.
    • The firearms expert’s judgment that conventional firearms (as well as homemade mortars) were being fired by the protesters was completely ignored.
    • Video evidence that a group of protesters had conventional weapons, and fired them at other protesters, were omitted from the large volume of video material that the investigators collected.
    • The deaths of two government supporters and the wounding by gunshot of 20 police officers were ignored.

    These errors and omissions at best left the reconstruction in doubt or at worst completely invalidated it. For example, an equally plausible reason for the deaths could be that they were part of a “return of fire” incident, or even that the protesters may have been shot by other protesters. Nevertheless, for El Pais and for the BBC, the reconstruction proved that the police were the killers.

    SITU and EAAF refused to respond to criticisms of their work. The IACHR and its parent body, the Organization of American States, has also ignored the contradictory information and revelations.

    Maidan Square, Kyiv, Ukraine, 20 February 2014

    On February 20, 2014, 49 protesters and four police were killed at the central square known as Maidan in Kyiv, Ukraine.  Many more were injured. The event led to the overthrow of the elected government and a radical change in national politics and policy. Who was responsible for the mass killings?  Eight years later, there have been no convictions. How could this be, when there were dozens of videos, hundreds of victims and thousands of witnesses to a mass killing in the heart of a European capital?

    Western media and the post-coup government blamed the security services of the previous Yanukovich government. Others claim the killings and chaos were organized by the militant opposition using snipers located in adjacent buildings, including the Hotel Ukraina and Arkada Bank.

    After the killings and coup, a German news team visited. Their report quotes doctors saying that both police and protesters had been shot by identical bullets. The investigation was ongoing yet the newly appointed state prosecutor, a leader of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, had already declared former President Yanukovich and Berkut police to be responsible.

    Despite the state prosecutor’s efforts and numerous police being charged and imprisoned, there were no convictions.

    In 2018, the New York Times (NYT) published a lengthy story titled “Who Killed the Kiev Protesters? A 3-D Model Holds the Clues“. It was accompanied by a video titled “Did Police Kill these protesters? What the videos show.” The NYT story reports that Ukrainian prosecutors enlisted the help of SITU Research, who built a replica of the street where protesters were shot, then did 3D modeling of the buildings, location of protesters, police, etc.. They analyzed dozens of actual videos then produced their own video concluding “In all three cases, individual officers can be seen aiming and firing their rifles during the moments leading to the victims’ deaths.”

    The “virtual crime scene” analysis focuses on three individuals killed in the same area. In all three cases, based on bullet wound locations, SITU alleges that the fatal shots were fired from the direction of the police barricade.  An audio analysis, based on the time difference of a shock wave versus firearm discharge, approximates the distance of the shooter.

    Looked at casually or superficially, this appears to be compelling evidence.

    However, Canadian Professor Ivan Katchanovski has done rigorous research on the Maidan Massacre and reveals that the SITU model misrepresented the location of wounds in all three cases.

    Illustration showing incorrect bullet trajectory on Kyiv victim (SITU Research)

    1/ In the case of Igor Dmytriv, the wound locations are not level and straight as portrayed by SITU; they are from right to left, with a distinct downward angle. The video shows a hole in his shield near the right edge which also points to his shooting from Arkada Bank to the right, not the police barricade directly in front.  The shield evidence disappeared before the trial.

    2/ The wound locations are also misrepresented in the case of Andriy Dyhdalovych. As discovered by Katchanovski, “The 3d model moved the exit wound location from around the middle line of the back of his body in forensic medical and clothing examinations to the right and changed a steep top and bottom direction and 17 cm difference in height.” SITU misrepresented the wounds to match up with the direction of the police barricade. The actual wound locations point to the killer also being in the upper floors of the Arkada Bank.

    3/ The third victim was Yuri Parashchuk: his wounds were also misrepresented. He was killed by a bullet to the back of his head. “The single bullet in the back right helmet area, and exit wounds in the back left area of his head (parietal region) in forensic examination mean that it was physically impossible to shoot him from the police barricade, contrary to the SITU model,” Katchanovski argues. The victim’s wife confirmed the gunshot wound locations.

    The NYT story falsely characterized any critics as “pro-Russia sources” and “Kremlin-funded media.”  University of Ottawa Professor Katchanovski has presented his findings to high interest before numerous academic conferences.

    In addition to misrepresenting the body wounds, the “virtual crime scene” analysis ignores a crucial question:  Who would have a motive to kill both protesters and police?

    Douma, Syria, 7 April 2018

    On 7 April 2018 there were sensational claims of a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria. Social media lit up with a video showing dead and living victims plus a chaotic scene in a medical clinic. The “White Helmets” claimed these were victims of a chemical attack by the Syrian military. Western media and governments quickly endorsed this accusation. The Syrian government denied it and called for a factual investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

    Without waiting for an inspection, the US declared, “The Assad regime and its backers must be held accountable.” One week later, the US, UK and France launched air attacks on Damascus.

    In late April, OPCW inspectors visited the site of the incident, interviewed witnesses, took photos and collected evidence.

    While the OPCW team were making their analysis, the NYT created a reconstruction of the event, using photos, videos and computer modeling. The “visual investigation” was presented in a 12-minute video, “One Building, One Bomb: How Assad Gassed His Own People“. With seven producers, three editors and the collaboration of a private agency called  “Forensic Architecture“, this was clearly a major and costly effort. It is a third example of how smooth video, computer modeling and professional voice-overs can lend an air of authority, whether true or not.

    On 25 June 2018, just ten weeks after the event, the NYT published “How We Created a Virtual Crime Scene to Investigate Syria’s Chemical Attack,” They say, “Our investigation found that the Syrian government dropped a chlorine bomb on this apartment in Syria.” For western politicians and media, that was the end of the matter: Syria had been found guilty and the western attacks vindicated.

    OPCW issued an interim report in July 2018 and full report in March 2019. They concluded there was evidence of reactive chlorine and there are “reasonable grounds that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon took place.”

    The governments which had attacked Syria claimed this was “proof” of guilt.  The UK foreign ministry said the report provided “reasonable grounds to conclude that a toxic chemical was used as a weapon.”  The NYT concluded that the OPCW had given “the most definitive finding yet to corroborate allegations that chemical weapons were dropped on the town, Douma, a suburb of Damascus, killing 43 people.” The Guardian similarly reported “Chlorine was used in attack on Syrian rebel town, watchdog says.”

    Behind the scenes, OPCW staff were in turmoil. Investigators were complaining the investigation report was politically influenced and biased.

    In May 2019, the “Engineering Assessment of Two Cylinders Observed at the Douma Incident” was published by an academic coalition. It was written by a lead engineer on the OPCW’s Douma team, Ian Henderson. It contradicted the official narrative and concluded that “there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft.” It gives detailed evidence to support this argument – evidence that should have been included in the original OPCW report.

    The OPCW fired Ian Henderson and made efforts to remove all evidence of his engineering report from the OPCW archives.

    Then in October 2019 a second OPCW whistle-blower emerged, giving more details of the report’s omissions. In a detailed interview, he told a British journalist that “Most of the Douma team felt the two reports on the incident, the Interim Report and the Final Report, were scientifically impoverished, procedurally irregular and possibly fraudulent.” He added that they had tried all possible internal channels before going public.

    Because of the importance of these revelations about a biased and compromised OPCW investigation, an international panel was convened. It included experts from international law, military, intelligence agencies and the founding Director General of the OPCW. It expressed “alarm” at the “unacceptable practices” in the Douma investigation.

    The scandal exposed the political manipulation of a crucial international organization, the OPCW.

    The “virtual crime scene” and evidence presented by the NYT was shown to be fundamentally flawed. The on-site engineering assessment revealed that cylinder deformation did not match the hole in the roof or what would have occurred if the cylinder was dropped from an aircraft. The “criss-cross” pattern on the cylinder that the NYT “virtual crime scene” suggested was evidence, was dismissed as “inconsistent with the vertical, or near-vertical, angle of incidence of the cylinder”. The lead investigator concluded that it was more likely the cylinders were “manually placed”. In other words, the incident was staged.

    Regarding the claim that “reactive chlorine” had been found in samples from the site, it was learned that these were trace levels that could be found in any location.

    After publishing headline stories such as “How Assad Gassed His Own People” and creating a costly contrived “virtual crime scene” to “prove” Syria’s guilt, it is understandable that the NYT would be embarrassed at the revelations from these OPCW whistle-blowers.  If the NYT were as factual as they claim to be, they would report these important stories and issue a correction and apology for their earlier false reports. Instead, there has been total silence.

    Supposed victim of April 2018 CW attack in Douma, during and after  (RT)

    Conclusion: What credibility should we give to “virtual crime scenes”?

    Creating “virtual crime scenes” is clearly a growing business: SITU appears to have done at least 24 such reconstructions, while Forensic Architecture has well over 70, dating back more than a decade. A common factor is funding sources: as well as what are presumed to be specific contracts (for example, with the NYT), both organizations receive funds from the Open Society Foundation, Oak Foundation, European Research Council and similar bodies aligned with conventional western political attitudes.

    No doubt some of this work is in the public good (for example, SITU says it is helping a group of children sue the US government for its inaction on the climate crisis). But the case studies above show that such work can – whether intentionally or otherwise – push public opinion on controversial issues in a particular direction.

    Brad Samuels, founding partner of SITU, appeared to acknowledge this ambiguity in an interview quoted here: “…it’s about not allowing these narratives to become the reason that there’s no accountability … so that you can focus on what you do know and I just — I think that that’s at play in all kinds of ways more than it ever has been … this question of competing narratives, truth claims and facts and that’s really what we’re, this work is about.”

    In an article about the use of virtual crime scenes in legal cases, Sarah Zarmsky concedes that they can be “extremely compelling” but that “any political motives or biases must be taken into account.” In the Maidan Square example, which she examines, she points out that the reconstruction was presented as “flawless” whereas Katchanovski later accused those who created it of misrepresentation. Virtual crime scenes are expensive, sophisticated exercises, which once published are left open to interpretation by people who have no expertise in how they are created, she points out. Where witness statements, amateur videos and other material are used to build reconstructions, there is no outside control of the process.  She concludes that “digital reconstructions need to be approached with caution and analyzed through a critical eye.”

    Our conclusion is more definitive: digital reconstructions, especially in high-profile and controversial circumstances like the three examples presented here, are being used to serve political purposes. Their sophisticated and compelling approaches, obviously requiring considerable resources in their production and presentation, can be highly misleading. Whether or not this is the intention of those devising these virtual crime scenes, their work is used to add momentum to political arguments. In the cases examined here – Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria – they have been explicitly used to endorse the US and European governments’ political narratives about those conflicts, creating apparent “proof” of one side’s culpability in violent incidents. However, objective analysis of the kind summarized in this article shows that digital reconstructions can hide the truth rather than reveal it. In Zarmsky’s words, “seeing should not always be believing.”

    The post How “virtual crime scenes” became a propaganda tool in Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How ‘Virtual Crime Scenes’ Became A Propaganda Tool

    This article shows how media uses computer modeling and “virtual crime scenes” to assign blame for some extremely important international events. In these examples from Nicaragua, Ukraine and Syria, many people died in complex circumstances. The deaths at the “Mother’s March” in Managua, Nicaragua precipitated an attempted coup.  The Maidan Massacre in Kyiv led to an actual coup. The claims of a chemical attack in Douma led to the US, France and the UK bombing Syria.

    The three incidents are in different continents but share some key characteristics: each is to some degree emblematic of the conflict of which it is part, cited as an important indicator of who is right and who is wrong. All three violent incidents are controversial, with both “sides” claiming to be right.

    The post How ‘Virtual Crime Scenes’ Became A Propaganda Tool appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • They’re Worried About The Spread Of Information, Not Disinformation

    ..corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • Has America Tried Bombing Its Mass Shooting Problem? Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Oh cool it’s the part of the news cycle where Democrats and Republicans pretend something’s going to change about American gun laws for a few days.

    “It’s a gun control problem!”

    “Nuh-uh it’s a mental health problem!”

    [Nothing changes about gun laws or mental health care]

    [Repeat]

    ❖

    There’s probably a correlation between the fact that the US is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic and the fact that Americans are the most aggressively propagandized population on earth.

    If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

    There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.

    It’s surely not a coincidence that the nation which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by mass murder and war propaganda and mass-scale psychological manipulation is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic. But this will never be studied.

    It will never be studied because empire is invisible to mainstream science and social psychology, in the same way it’s invisible to mainstream media, mainstream politics, and mainstream academia. The empire is not even acknowledged to exist within the spheres of mainstream thought, and this is a deliberately engineered reality. The spheres of mainstream thought which prevent people from understanding that we are dominated by an unacknowledged empire which stretches across nations and influences our lives more than virtually anything else our attention is diverted to are actively influenced by that very empire.

    We are all marinating in the US-centralized empire: its influence, its propaganda, its artificially manufactured culture, its ways of thinking. We’re so immersed in it we can’t see it. It’s like water for fish to us. So we won’t see any research into its influence on the collective psyche.

    ❖

    It’s weird how every US president is expected to say something after a mass shooting when US presidents are always orders of magnitude more murderous than the act they’re decrying.

    “Who’s the one person we should look to after a horrific mass murder? Oh how about the head of the most murderous power structure on earth whose very existence depends on nonstop mass murder?”

    ❖

    Everyone shit their guts out for weeks when Trump made some asinine tweets about North Korea but Biden repeatedly threatening direct hot war with China while waging a world-threatening proxy war against Russia is just fine normal stuff.

    ❖

    In terms of contemporary analysis of conflict and strategy, Henry Kissinger hasn’t been one of the world’s worst war hawks for decades. This is true not because he has gotten less psychopathic, but because everyone else in Washington has gotten more so.

     

    Yes Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. Yes Henry Kissinger is a psychopath. Yes the world will be better off when it is finally disencumbered of him. And, also, the US foreign policy establishment has grown much, much more insane than Henry Kissinger.

    ❖

    The US empire has been using impoverished human beings from the Global South as testing animals and target practice for its instruments of war in preparation for much larger military confrontations that it has long been planning for.

    ❖

    You’ve got to graduate from an Ivy League university and read all the latest reports from the most esteemed think tanks to get smart enough to understand why it’s a good idea to fight Russia and China at the same time.

    ❖

    If there was a giant multitrillion-dollar corporation that was allowed to kill anyone it wants to secure its success, its behavior would not be functionally different from that of the US empire.

    ❖

    I never give mainstream media “credit” on those rare occasions when they do something right. They’re supposed to get it right. You don’t get brownie points for not lying and propagandizing as aggressively as you normally do. You don’t give a cop credit for not shooting everyone.

    ❖

    If you’re a popular comedian living under a murderous and tyrannical globe-spanning empire, it’s pretty pathetic to spend your career punching any direction but up.

    ❖

    It doesn’t take much work to understand that the US government is an evil institution. It does take a fair bit of work to understand that the US government is a uniquely evil institution on the world stage, with no one else coming anywhere close. People have trouble getting this; for some reason it’s not too psychologically confrontational to acknowledge that your government is or is allied with one of many bad actors, but it often causes a lot of cognitive dissonance to grapple with the possibility that it’s the absolute worst actor, by a very large margin.

    _______________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • They’re Worried About The Spread Of Information, Not Disinformation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re in the final countdown to British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to the United States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has a new article out with Consortium News on the various pressures that Patel is being faced with from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial time.

    And I can’t stop thinking, as this situation comes to a boil, about how absurd it is that the US empire is working to set a precedent which essentially outlaws information-sharing that the US doesn’t like at the same time western news media are full of hand-wringing headlines about the dangerous threat of “disinformation”.

    Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has an article out titled “‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts” about the way the mass media have been spinning that label to mean not merely the knowing distribution of false information but also of information that is true but inconvenient to imperial narrative-weaving.

    “In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as ‘disinformation’ spread by Russia or its proxies,” writes FAIR’s Luca Goldmansour.

    Online platforms have been ramping up their censorship protocols under the banner of fighting disinformation and misinformation, and those escalations always align with narrative control agendas of the US-centralized empire. Just the other day we learned that Twitter has a new policy which expands its censorship practices to fight “misinformation” about wars and other crises, and the Ukraine war (surprise surprise) will be the first such situation about which it will be enforcing these new censorship policies.

    Then there’s the recent controversy over the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board,” a mysterious institution ostensibly designed to protect the American people from wrongthink coming from Russia and elsewhere. The board’s operations (whatever they were) have been “paused” pending a review which will be led by Michael Chertoff, a virulent swamp monster and torture advocate. Its operations will likely be resumed in one form or another, probably under the leadership of someone with a low profile who doesn’t sing show tunes about disinformation.

    And this all comes out after US officials straight up told the press that the Biden administration has been deliberately sowing disinformation to the public using the mainstream press in order to win an infowar against the Kremlin. They’ve literally just been circulating completely baseless stories about Russia and Ukraine, but nobody seems to be calling for the social media accounts of Biden administration officials to be banned.

    You see so many discrepancies between what the oligarchic empire says and what it actually does regarding the issue of disinformation because the empire has no problem with disinformation. The empire that is built on propaganda and lies has no problem with propaganda and lies. It has a problem with the truth.

    They’re not worried about disinformation, they’re worried about information. They’re worried about journalists using the unprecedented information-sharing power of the internet to reveal inconvenient facts about the largest and most murderous power structure on earth. They’re worried about people finding out that they’ve been lied to their entire lives about their world, their nation and their government. They’re worried about people using their newly connected minds to decide together that they don’t much like the status quo as it’s been laid out for them, and deciding to build a new one.

    All the safeguards they’re setting up now to manipulate the flow of information online are not there to eliminate lies, they’re there to eliminate truth. These people have a vested interest in keeping things dark and confused, and we the ordinary people of the world have a vested interest in shining a big inconvenient spotlight on everything. The elite agenda to keep things endarkened is at direct odds with the people’s agenda to get things enlightened.

    We are not being protected by a compassionate alliance of corporations and governments who only want us to know the truth, we are being manipulated and oppressed by an oligarchic empire that wants us to believe lies. That’s why they’re locking up Assange, that’s why they’re censoring the internet, that’s why they’re filling our minds with propaganda, and that’s why we can’t let them win.

    ______________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Image via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • MSM Is Empire Fanfic For Children: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    April 2022: Zelensky speaks at the Grammy Awards

    May 2022: Zelensky speaks at Cannes Film Festival

    June 2022: Zelensky hosts SNL

    July 2022: Zelensky stars as himself in action biopic co-starring The Rock

    August 2022: Zelensky releases his own breakfast cereal and clothing line

    September 2022: Celebrities are flocking to the new Hollywood pop religion known as Zelenskyyology

    ❖

    It’s often a long, awkward process learning that literally everyone in both mainstream political factions serves the oligarchic empire. For most people you have to get your hopes dashed over and over again by your heroes before learning this lesson, and even then many don’t.

    It runs counter to everything you’re taught in life that nobody in either camp is there to help you. There’s a fundamental assumption that someone among them must be decent. But if you watch carefully with enough intellectual honesty you’ll see it again and again: there’s a line that, for one justification or another, none of them ever end up crossing, and it’s the line where they would have to begin providing meaningful opposition to the oligarchic empire.

    At first it makes no sense. How can there be no good guys? Not one? Then you realize: it’s because you’re living in an oligarchic empire which only elevates people who serve its interests, whether it’s in politics, government, or media. The “opposition” between mainstream factions is an illusion cooked up by the empire and continually reinforced by its narrative managers.

    But you only see this if you’re intellectually honest enough to overcome your own cognitive biases. Otherwise you’ll keep doing mental gymnastics to justify the bullshit coming from Bernie, AOC, TYT, Tucker Carlson, Trump, MAGA pundits, wherever your biases are located on the map.

    And then when you do see it people accuse you of being an angry hater who doesn’t have anything positive to say about anyone in politics or media, when really it’s got nothing to do with being negative but with your understanding that the machine always protects the machine.

    ❖

    This proxy war isn’t about defending Ukraine, it’s about quashing a nation which has consistently resisted absorption into the US-centralized imperial blob. That agenda is best served by keeping this war going as long as possible and making it as gruelling and costly as possible for Moscow. Peace is not on the menu.

    Even if Ukraine does somehow achieve total victory in the near term, it wouldn’t mean peace, it would mean more war. If Russia is driven out the war will just change shape into a concerted effort to oust Putin and shatter the Russian Federation.

    This war could easily have been avoided with a little diplomacy and low-cost, high-reward concessions. The US had good visibility into the Kremlin’s plans, so they knew this. They chose not to because they wanted to use this war to hurt Putin.

    ❖

    A massive percentage of the people who are getting Russia and Ukraine right are going to turn into the worst people in the world once conflict shifts to China. Pretty much only the anti-imperialist left and a specific subset of antiwar libertarians will get both issues entirely correct.

    ❖

    I get asked if I think the US should do anything if China attacks Taiwan. I tell them I don’t think the US should do anything if any nation does anything. The US is the very last nation on earth that should ever do anything about any other nation.

    ❖

    We don’t talk enough about how disturbing it is that Silicon Valley megacorporations have just accepted that it’s their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia and everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal.

    ❖

    Man: [steals most of everyone’s wealth]

    Everyone: Hey give that back!

    Man: You’re all just jealous of my success.

    ❖

    ❖

    Can’t believe empire managers have the gall to keep babbling about “disinformation” even as they work to extradite a journalist to the United States to defend the empire’s right to lie to us about its war crimes.

    ❖

    I’ve met some cute kids in my time but nobody’s as adorable as people who think Assange can get a fair Espionage Act trial in the United States of America.

    ❖

    I want to live in this idyllic fantasy world where the US pours weapons into foreign nations because it cares deeply about their freedom and orchestrates the military encirclement of Russia and China because it wants to protect the world from tyranny.

    The mainstream news media is empire fanfic for slow kids.

    ❖

    Your average Ivy League graduate working for a prominent military industrial complex-funded think tank has less insight into what’s happening with Russia and China than your average random citizen with internet access and sincere curiosity about those nations.

    ❖

    People who’ve escaped abusive relationships with bitchy, vindictive, passive aggressive manipulators have a natural advantage when in comes to deciphering the malevolence of the US empire.

    ___________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Ukraine War Has Not Stoked A Global Food Crisis

    Above photo: The Mariupol Commercial Sea Port in the city of Mariupol. Vladimir Gerdo/TASS. Russia is falsely accused of blocking Ukraine’s sea ports and thereby increasing a global food shortage: The United Nations has warned that the war in Ukraine has helped to stoke a global food crisis that could last years if it goes unchecked, as […]

    The post The Ukraine War Has Not Stoked A Global Food Crisis appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government

    (This article contains reports about child rape which might be intense for some people.)

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

    The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.

    “A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday,” reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. “The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique.”

    At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:

    “Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim.”

    In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.

    “The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights,” The Daily Beast writes.

    The one and only source for this latest spate of “the Russians are raping babies to death” stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:

    I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people.

     

    I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country!

     

    The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice!

    This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit.

    We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn’t warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don’t treat that like it’s an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can’t prove it’s false. That’s not how the burden of proof works.

    Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.

    As we discussed previously, the US and its proxies have an established history of using atrocity propaganda, as in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the infamous 1990 Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War.

    Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

    Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people’s logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel.

    And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it’s meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that’s been forcibly injected into public discourse and you’ll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war.

    “Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine,” Chalupa tweeted.

    See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it’s an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it’s done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations?

    That’s atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.

    Now on top of all the other reasons we’re being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire’s goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex.

    And that wasn’t even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled “Russians Targeting Kids’ Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team,” which informs us that “The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds.”

    Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:

    “Newsweek has not independently verified the claim.”

    The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a “unit of brave de-miners” while calling Russian forces “barbaric”.

    ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children’s beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:

    “The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine’s President.”

    Ahh, so what you’re being told by Ukrainian forces “backs up” what you’ve been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn’t get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.

    The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they’re being given.

    This is something the western press know is happening. They know full well that Ukraine is waging a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against Russia and seeding disinformation to facilitate that infowar. It’s not a secret. They are participating in that campaign knowingly.

    The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what’s happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.

    And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of “disinformation” and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they’ve been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the “fact checkers” of social media platforms.

    The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents.

    It’s getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Twitter To Ramp Up Censorship Of ‘Misinformation’ About The Ukraine War

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”

    If you’ve been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we’ve been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied.

    Twitter says that it “won’t amplify or recommend content” found to violate its new policy, and will also attach warning labels to individual tweets and even hide offending content behind a warning label and disable the retweet function on particularly naughty posts.

    The problem here is of course the question of how to impartially establish whether something is objectively false without it turning into at best a flawed system guided by fallible human biases and perceptual filters and at worst a powerful institution shutting down unauthorized speech. Twitter says it formed its new policy with input from unnamed “global experts and human rights organizations,” and will be enforcing it with the help of “conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more.” This will come as no comfort to anyone who’s familiar with the history of propaganda peddling that can be found in every single one of those respective categories.

    Twitter lists the following examples of the kind of content that will be found in violation of its crisis misinformation policy:

    • False coverage or event reporting, or information that mischaracterizes conditions on the ground as a conflict evolves;
    • False allegations regarding use of force, incursions on territorial sovereignty, or around the use of weapons;
    • Demonstrably false or misleading allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations;
    • False information regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations.

    When Jack Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO last November, I noted the warning signs we were seeing that his replacement, Parag Agrawal, supported the use of measures which make unauthorized content much less visible than authorized content without eliminating the unauthorized content altogether.

    “There’s a lot of content out there,” Agrawal said in a 2020 interview. “A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

    This agenda to “direct people’s attention” toward “healthy public conversation” by controlling how content is “recommended” to viewers echoes the censorship-by-algorithm tactics we’ve seen employed by Facebook, Google, and by Google-owned YouTube. Google has been hiding dissident media in its search results for years, and in 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

    Twitter has generally been the most reluctant of the major platforms to exercise censorship on behalf of the empire, which is what has made it a better source of ideas and information than any other major platform. But now we’re seeing the most pernicious form of online censorship, censorship by manipulation of content visibility, take hold there as well.

    Censorship by visibility manipulation is the most destructive form of online censorship that exists, because its consequences are both so much more far-reaching and so much less attention-grabbing than the controversial act of banning users from platforms or removing their posts. It’s a kind of censorship that people don’t even know is happening, and it’s happening all over the place.

    It is deeply disturbing how Silicon Valley megacorporations have simply accepted that it is their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia, and how everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal. Our ability to share ideas and information on the platforms where most people congregate is being increasingly restricted, not on the basis of whether our speech is harmful, or even whether it is true, but on whether it helps or hinders the US propaganda campaign against Russia.

    Silicon Valley censorship with the Ukraine war is an unprecedented escalation because they’re not pretending to be doing it to protect people from a virus or to safeguard elections or defend the public good in any way. It’s literally just “Well we can’t have people thinking wrong thoughts about a war,” without even really explaining why that’s important in any coherent and sensical fashion.

    There’s no longer any pretense that the internet is being censored to protect the public interest. It’s just open censorship of information about a war, solely because they take it as a given that it’s their job to control the things people think and say about that war. They’re coming right out and saying yes, we are the platforms you come to in order to share ideas and information with your fellow humans, and yes, we are agents of the US empire. This is a dramatic escalation.

    All this public hand wringing about misinformation and disinformation is itself disinformation. They’re not worried about the spread of disinformation, they’re worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you’ll start learning false things about Covid or the war in Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers. That’s what all this fuss is really about.

    They are locking down our minds and sanitizing our information ecosystem for the protection of the empire. I will keep saying this and saying this for as long as I am able: we’ve got to wake up and stop these bastards before it is too late.

    ______________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The TV Man Is Not Your Friend: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    It’s very cute how empire apologists talk about driving Putin from Ukraine so there can be peace, like that’s a real thing. Like if it happened the war would just stop, and the US alliance wouldn’t with absolute certainty continue the attack and work to topple Moscow by any means necessary.

    There’s zero reason to take on faith the MSM narrative that Ukraine is kicking Putin’s ass and victory is imminent, but even if that did happen there’d be less than zero reason to believe the fighting would stop there. If anything it would get much more dangerous from that point.

    This doesn’t end with Russia leaving Ukraine, it ends with Putin being replaced with a Yeltsin-like US vassal and the eventual balkanization of the Russian Federation. Really it doesn’t end until Beijing has been subverted and the US empire secures total global hegemony. Or when the empire collapses. Or when we all get nuked and die.

    Empire apologists don’t even really deny this:

    ❖

    Marjorie Taylor Greene being better than progressive Democrats on Ukraine is noteworthy not because it makes Greene look good but because it makes those progressive Democrats look really, really, really bad.

    ❖

    People who think Tucker Carlson is fighting the establishment are exactly the same as people who think “the Squad” is fighting the establishment. Exactly the same. Same people, slightly different bumper stickers.

    It’s obvious that every member of the “populist right” who’s now getting praise for being correct about Ukraine will function as virulent empire propagandists once the imperial crosshairs inevitably move from Moscow to Beijing. We know this because of their rhetoric about China today.

    Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch media no less) means he’s an agent of the empire.

    This belief that there are factions of the mainstream media working against the empire is as naive as the belief that there are factions of mainstream US politicians working against the empire. The empire doesn’t platform people who pose a threat to it. This isn’t complicated. The TV man is not your friend.

    I run into far too many people who oppose war and can’t understand why I’m saying things about issues like China which disagree with what they’re being told by their “populist antiwar” heroes on the right. The propaganda campaign against China isn’t going to get better; it’s going to get much, much worse, and it’s important to start fighting it early. Because it’s going to be bad.

    ❖

    ❖

    They’re not worried about the spread of disinformation, they’re worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you’ll start learning wrong things about Covid or Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers.

    The imperial power structure which runs Silicon Valley, and which is imprisoning Julian Assange, and which literally just admitted it’s circulating disinformation about Russia, is not worried about disinformation. And it’s hilarious that anyone is pretending otherwise.

    ❖

    “No no you don’t understand, if the US and its allies didn’t give weapons to Al Qaeda and Nazi militias, the bad guys might win.”

    ❖

    The one single time the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the same time it was at war, it used them. Not because it needed to, but as a show of force. That was the dawn of the modern US empire. That’s how it was born. And it never got any saner from there.

    ❖

    There is a kind of poetic beauty, I guess in the way the US empire was birthed onto the world stage by a nuclear blast and will probably die in the same way.

    ❖

    Psychological abuse is still abuse. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny. The fact that a large amount of the tyranny in so-called free democracies expresses as mass-scale psychological manipulation does not make it less tyrannical, it just makes it more photogenic.

    ❖

    All of religion and almost all spirituality is glorified escapism at best and tyrannical psychological domination at worst, and humanity would be better off without it. But what remains just might save the world.

    ____________________

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

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric

    While the so-called liberal and conservative corporate mainstream media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.

    A woman I know, and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda, contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them.  This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.

    Nevertheless, out of respect for her judgment and knowing how deeply she feels for all suffering people, I read the article.  Written by Alice Speri, its title sounded ambiguous – “The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” – until I saw the subtitle that begins with these words: “Russia’s brutal invasion complicates…”  But I read on.  By the fourth paragraph, it became clear where this article was going.  Speri writes that “In Ukraine, by contrast [with Iraq], it was Russia that had staged an illegal, unprovoked invasion, and U.S.-led support to Ukraine was understood by many as crucial to stave off even worse atrocities than those the Russian military had already committed.” [my emphasis]

    While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

    There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed.  It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocative.  And there is this:

    The uncertain response of Europe’s peace activists is both a reflection of a brutal, unprovoked invasion that stunned the world and of an anti-war movement that has grown smaller and more marginalized over the years. The left in both Europe and the U.S. have struggled to respond to a wave of support for Ukraine that is at cross purposes with a decades long effort to untangle Europe from a U.S.-led military alliance. [my emphasis]

    In other words, the article, couched in anti-war rhetoric, was anti-Russia propaganda.  When I told my friend my analysis, she refused to discuss it and got angry with me, as if I therefore were a proponent of war  I have found this is a common response.

    This got me thinking again about why people so often miss the untruths lying within articles that are in many parts truthful and accurate.  I notice this constantly.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few do notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly schooled people.

    For example, in a recent printed  interview, Noam Chomsky, after being introduced as a modern day Galileo, Newton, and Descartes rolled into one, talks about propaganda, its history, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, etc.  What he says is historically accurate and informative for anyone not knowing this history.  He speaks wisely of U.S. media propaganda concerning its unprovoked war against Iraq and he accurately calls the war in Ukraine “provoked.”  And then, concerning the war in Ukraine, he drops this startling statement:

    I don’t think there are ‘significant lies’ in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.

    In the blink of an eye, Chomsky says something so incredibly untrue that unless one thinks of him as a modern day Galileo, which many do, it may pass as true and you will smoothly move on to the next paragraph.  Yet it is a statement so false as to be laughable.  The media propaganda concerning events in Ukraine has been so blatantly false and ridiculous that a careful reader will stop suddenly and think: Did he just say that?

    So now Chomsky views the media, such as The New York Times and its ilk, that he has correctly castigated for propagandizing for the U.S. in Iraq and East Timor, to use two examples, is doing “a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine,” as if suddenly they were no longer spokespeople for the CIA and U.S. disinformation.  And he says this when we are in the midst of the greatest propaganda blitz since WW I, with its censorship, Disinformation Governance Board, de-platforming of dissidents, etc., that border on a parody of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

    Even slicker is his casual assertion that the media are doing a good job reporting Russia’s war crimes after he earlier has said this about propaganda:

    So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.

    This is simply masterful.  Explain what propaganda is at its best and how you oppose it and then drop a soupçon of it into your analysis.  And while he is at it, Chomsky makes sure to praise Chris Hedges, one of his followers, who has himself recently wrote an article – The Age of Self-Delusion – that also contains valid points appealing to those sick of wars, but which also contains the following words:

    Putin’s revanchism is matched by our own.

    The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command, apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days, exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace.

    ‘The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself,’ historian Andrew Bacevich writes.

    But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. [my emphasis]

    Russia’s revanchism?  Where?  Revanchism?  What lost territory has the U.S. ever waged war to recover?  Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc.?  The U.S.’s history is a history not of revanchism but of imperial conquest, of seizing or controlling territory, while Russia’s war in Ukraine is clearly an act of self-defense after years of U.S./NATO/Ukraine provocations and threats, which Hedges recognizes.  “Nine weeks of humiliating military failures”? – when they control a large section of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Donbass.  But his false message is subtly woven, like Chomsky’s, into sentences that are true.

    “But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public.”  No, it is exactly what the media spokespeople for the war makers – i.e. The New York Times (Hedges former employer, which he never fails to mention and for whom he covered the Clinton administration’s savage destruction of Yugoslavia), CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, the New York Post, etc. impart to the public every day for their masters.  Headlines that read how Russia, while allegedly committing daily war crimes, is failing in its war aims and that the mythic hero Zelensky is leading Ukrainians to victory.  Words to the effect that “The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself” presented as fact.

    Yes, they do inflate the Russian monster myth, only to then puncture it with the myth of David defeating Goliath.

    But being in the business of mind games (too much consistency leads to clarity and gives the game away), one can expect them to scramble their messages on an ongoing basis to serve the U.S. agenda in Ukraine and further NATO expansion in the undeclared war with Russia, for which the Ukrainian people will be sacrificed.

    Orwell called it “doublethink”:

    Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary….with the lie always one step ahead of the truth.

    Revealing while concealing and interjecting inoculating shots of untruths that will only get cursory attention from their readers, the writers mentioned here and others have great appeal for the left intelligentsia.  For people who basically worship those they have imbued with infallibility and genius, it is very hard to read all sentences carefully and smell a skunk.  The subterfuge is often very adroit and appeals to readers’ sense of outrage at what happened in the past – e.g. the George W. Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

    Chomsky, of course, is the leader of the pack, and his followers are legion, including Hedges.  For decades they have been either avoiding or supporting the official versions of the assassinations of JFK and RFK, the attacks of September 11, 2001 that led directly to the war on terror and so many wars of aggression,and the recent Covid-19 propaganda with its devastating lockdowns and crackdowns on civil liberties.  They are far from historical amnesiacs, of course, but obviously consider these foundational events of no importance, for otherwise they would have addressed them.  If you expect them to explain, you will be waiting a long time.

    In a recent article – How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy – Christian Parenti writes this about Chomsky:

    Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.

    Parenti’s critique of the left’s response (not just Chomsky’s and Hedges’) to Covid also applies to those foundational events mentioned above, which raises deeper questions about the CIA’s and NSA’s penetration  of the media in general, a subject beyond the scope of this analysis.

    For those, like the liberal woman who referred me to The Intercept article, who would no doubt say of what I have written here: Why are you picking on leftists? my reply is quite simple.

    The right-wing and the neocons are obvious in their pernicious agendas; nothing is really hidden; therefore they can and should be opposed. But many leftists serve two masters and are far subtler. Ostensibly on the side of regular people and opposed to imperialism and the predations of the elites at home and abroad, they are often tricksters of beguiling rhetoric that their followers miss. Rhetoric that indirectly fuels the wars they say they oppose.

    Smelling skunks is not as obvious as it might seem.  Being nocturnal, they come forth when most are sleeping.

    The post The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The British Art of Black Propaganda

    Never underestimate the potency, and deceptive malice, of the British political mind.  In responding to the threat posed by Imperial Germany during the First World War, the British propaganda campaign made much of the atrocity tale, the nun raping German and the baby bayoneting Hun.  The effectiveness of the campaign was so impressive it sowed doubt amongst a generation about the reliability of war crimes accounts.

    In its efforts to try to win US support for its cause against Hitler in World War II, the train of British propaganda again operated with a concerted effect, demonising isolationists and denigrating supporters and members of the America First Committee.  The great hope there was that Britain would fight the Germans to the last American.  It led to one of the largest covert operations in UK history conducted under the auspices of an agency known as “British Security Coordination”.  During the course of its operations, BSC subject matter entered the American political bloodstream, aided by the injecting activities of Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson, a radio station (WRUL) and the Overseas News Agency (ONA).

    During the Cold War, the black propagandists were again in high demand.  In 2021, the Observer revealed that the Information Research Department (IRD) had done its bit to egg on the massacres of communists and sympathisers in Indonesia in 1965.  Pamphlets supposedly authored by seething Indonesian patriots but cooked up by the dark musings of the IRD, called for the elimination of the Indonesian communist party, the PKI.  The deaths that followed numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

    The IRD, which had, at its height in the mid-1960s, a staff of 360, had a primary purpose: to counter Soviet propaganda and its effects in Britain.  It had its origins in the opening shots of the Cold War, established in 1948 but found itself behind the efforts of various sections of Whitehall already dedicated to the anti-Soviet effort.

    Its program was more engaged and more ambitious than previously thought.  “It’s very clear now,” Rory Cormac, an authority on subversion and intelligence history, explained to the Guardian, “that the UK engaged in more black propaganda than historians assume and these efforts were more systemic, ambitious and offensive.  Despite official denials, [this] went far beyond merely exposing Soviet disinformation.”

    The effects of propaganda can be perversely insidious.  Allies or friendly nations can be used and abused if the aim is to advance the security of the propagandist.  As Howard Becker laconically puts it in describing the consequences of black propaganda, “truth or falsity, as determined by any standard, is not raised.  Propaganda which achieves its end may be entirely true, it may be entirely false; expedient rationality alone governs the choice of means.”

    The IRD shows that, while it was more modest in scale to its US, Soviet and East European counterparts, it could hold its own in terms of inventiveness.  It specialised in creating fake news sources and false statements designed to stir pots of racial tension, create instability, and foster social and political chaos.

    A feature of the black propaganda campaign was the forging of statements by official Soviet bodies and entities.  The Soviet-run news agency Novosti was something of a favourite, given the release of 11 fake statements supposedly authored by the body between 1965 and 1972.

    In the wake of Israel’s lightning victory during the Six-Day War of 1967, the outfit drafted a number of documents claiming to be authored by disgruntled Muslim organisations sore at defeat and seeking answers.  One did not have to look far for the culprit of godless Communism.  “Why is the Arab nation at this time afflicted by so much sorry and disaster?” asks a statement purportedly issued from the League of Believers, a fictional Islamist organisation.  “Why were the brave forces defeated in the jihad by the evil heathen Zionists?”  The reason: that “we are departing from the right path, we are following the course chosen for us by the communist-atheists for whom religion is a form of social disease.”

    Other material focused on existing and influential organisations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood.  One pamphlet from the IRD, supposedly issued by the group, takes issue with the quality of Soviet weaponry.  As for the Soviets themselves, they were “filthy-tongued atheists” who had little time for Egyptians, mere “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary superstitions”.

    In Africa, propaganda efforts were made to malign the activities of Soviet front organisations such as the World Federation of Democratic Youth.  Nationalist, revolutionary figures were also targeted.  A statement from early 1963, forged by the IRD, has the WFDY falsely accusing Africans of being morally feeble, uncivilised, and “primitive”.  The theme is repeated in another forged statement three years later, and in a fake release by Novosti noting the poor quality of African students enrolled at an international university in Moscow.

    These recent revelations do have a certain flavour of told-you-so obviousness, but serve as reminders that the news, however official, reeks when consulted between the lines (and lies).  Cormac reminds us that the current UK foreign secretary, Liz Truss, has her own “government information cell”, a distant echo of the IRD.  It pays to look behind the merits of the next news bulletin, if only to be disillusioned.

    The post The British Art of Black Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pentagon-Funded Think Tank Simulates War With China On NBC

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

    CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has described as the de facto US embassy in Taiwan.

    The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the US military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank’s simulation of a military conflict with China at all.

    It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for re-evaluating the administration’s posture toward China. That man, Ely Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration.

    It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other “experts and alumni” who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration.

    It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden’s Pentagon chief, wrote a Foreign Affairs op-ed in 2020 arguing that the US needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

    It also happens that CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine has been featured all over the mass media pushing empire narratives about Russia and China, telling Bloomberg just the other day that the war in Ukraine could serve the empire’s long-term interests against China.

    “The war in Ukraine could end up being bad for the pivot in the short-term, but good in the long-term,” Fontaine said. “If Russia emerges from this conflict as a weakened version of itself and Germany makes good on its defense spending pledges, both trends could allow the US to focus more on the Indo-Pacific in the long run.”

     

    It also happens that CNAS is routinely cited by the mass media as an authoritative source on all things China and Russia, with no mention ever made of the conflict of interest arising from their war machine funding. Just in the last few days here’s a recent NPR interview about NATO expansion with CNAS senior fellow Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a Washington Post quote from CNAS fellow Jacob Stokes about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, a Financial Times quote from CNAS “Indo-Pacific expert” Lisa Curtis (who I’ve previously noted was cited by the mass media for her “expert” opposition to the US Afghanistan withdrawal), and a Foreign Policy citation of the aforementioned Richard Fontaine saying “The aim of U.S. policy toward China should be to ensure that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order.”

    As we’ve discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.

    This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire’s final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.

    This is headed somewhere very, very bad. Hopefully humanity wakes up in time to stop these lunatics from driving us off a precipice from which there is no return.

    _________________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Reality Privileged: Orwell/Huxley/McLuhan on Steroids

    You can go through life with a thousand epigrams or deep quotes that you might come back to over two, four, six decades. Then, the disrupters pop up, those techno fascists, the tinkers and culture blasters.

    These sociopaths who get the limelight then become part of a new set of epigrams, but not grand ones, but totally emblematic of a new normal of Triple Speak, Capitalism Porn, and the Stiff Arm to the Coders and their Masters.

    It’s sad, really. Here, quality ones of very different and varied origins:

    • Timothy 6:10 “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”
    • Pierre Joseph-Proudhon: “Property is Theft.”
    • Karl Marx: “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital.”
    • “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
      ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
    • “It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.”
      ― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

    We don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’re stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary state’s attorneys like this and reactionary state’s attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactons with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.
    ― Fred Hampton (source: “Fred Hampton Speech Transcript on Revolution and Racism” ) 

    “Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.”
    ― Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

    One might wake up after two decades of capitalist slumber and feel like Rip Van Winkle while observing how deep the slide into those circles of capitalist hell we have all ended up. Exhumed from the grave all the felons, high and midddling, and then see that the world is still valorizing . . . Kissinger, Albright, Bush, Trump, Biden, Obama, et al. Shocks to the system every nano second. Capitalism with a gun, with a drug, with a bank.

    Here, McLuhan:

    Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly. (Marshall McLuhan rocketed from an unknown academic to rockstar with the publication of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Manin 1964.)

    Concentrated power — information age, and now, it’s even so much worse, 60 years later.

    Get these people’s aims and goals. These are the powerful, work with the powerful, are armies unto themselves, and they take no prisoners. We are all Luddites if we resist their machinations, their totalitarianism in skinny jeans, on the spectrum, vegan and all.

    I’ll let the guy’s words flow here, longish. Monsters, really:

    Marc Andreessen (“The Internet King on why the Internet is a force for good, on media conformity, the inevitable triumph of the WEIRD, Crypto, ‘Retards,’ etc. — Source) breaks down Reality Privilege:

    Your question is a great example of what I call Reality Privilege. This is a paraphrase of a concept articulated by Beau Cronin: “Consider the possibility that a visceral defense of the physical, and an accompanying dismissal of the virtual as inferior or escapist, is a result of superuser privileges.” A small percent of people live in a real-world environment that is rich, even overflowing, with glorious substance, beautiful settings, plentiful stimulation, and many fascinating people to talk to, and to work with, and to date. These are also *all* of the people who get to ask probing questions like yours. Everyone else, the vast majority of humanity, lacks Reality Privilege—their online world is, or will be, immeasurably richer and more fulfilling than most of the physical and social environment around them in the quote-unquote real world.

    The Reality Privileged, of course, call this conclusion dystopian, and demand that we prioritize improvements in reality over improvements in virtuality. To which I say: reality has had 5,000 years to get good, and is clearly still woefully lacking for most people; I don’t think we should wait another 5,000 years to see if it eventually closes the gap. We should build—and we are building—online worlds that make life and work and love wonderful for everyone, no matter what level of reality deprivation they find themselves in.

    Here’s a thought experiment for the counterfactual. Suppose we had all just spent the last 15 months of COVID lockdowns *without* the Internet, without the virtual world. As bad as the lockdowns have been for people’s well-being—and they’ve been bad—how much worse would they have been without the Internet? I think the answer is clear: profoundly, terribly worse. (Of course, pandemic lockdowns are not the norm—for that, we’ll have to wait for the climate lockdowns.)

    Is this an easy target? Am I just poking fun at culture, the new masters of the metaverse? Are we speaking two very “man who fell to earth” languages? Or, is this fellow above, misanthrope on a very pathetic scale? We know he’s got hundreds of millions, and he is the guru, and governments and the Titans of Media all have his ear.

    Oh, I have old people whispering how they feel for today’s kids, how they feel for the young adults who are stuck in this bubble inside a bubble. I hear them while they have grand machinations of flipping a home into a bank account and some smaller home. Too expensive in Pacific Northwest or California? Then, sell sell sell, and end up in Appalachia. Lewisburg. Get a home and two acres for $250K, and bank the rest, and be damned, the rest of the world.

    Me-myself-I, that’s the reptilian brain angle these Titans of the Screen/Black Mirror in the Hand have going for them (not a great term, really, repitilian, but you get the picture — food, sex, water, fight or flight, flash, rest, run, jump, gobble, hump).

    Indonesia cancels Komodo island closure, saying tourists are no threat to dragons | Indonesia | The Guardian

    Get these stats, mom and pop, uncle and aunt, cuz:

    In Chain Reactions, he writes about how stunning the scale of the internet has become; every minute on the internet:

    • Netflix users stream 404,444 hours of video
    • Instagram users post 347,222 stories
    • YouTube users upload 500 hours of video
    • Consumers spend $1,000,000 online
    • LinkedIn users apply for 69,444 jobs
    • TikTok is installed 2,704 times
    • Venmo users send $239,196 worth of payments
    • Spotify adds 28 tracks to its music library
    • Amazon ships 6,659 packages
    • WhatsApp users send 41,666,667 messages
    • And 1,388,889 people make video and voice calls

    Every minute. American adults spend over 11 hours interacting with digital media every day. Daily media consumption on mobile has grown 6x from 45 minutes in 2011 to 4 hours and 12 minutes in 2021.

    The Brains Development - The Cavern

    The “entire world is a stage” is played out minute by minute, in Ukraine by the Zionist Comic Nazi-loving Jew (not-not), or the charades of Biden and the gang (media). Now? Every man, woman, child is an island — connected to the WWW — unto him-her-them SELF:

    Biden mocks himself and roasts Trump

    This is it, while the crocodile tears are spewing for the poor Ukrainians, and the trillion$ soon for guns, nukes, these idiots try a Jon Leibowitz Stewart thing: White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night. The dinner was shunned by Trump and canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    But then, they all are misanthropes, and again, the optics, man, the optics of the USA decaying while Biden shits his pants: “I’m really excited to be here with the only group of Americans with a lower approval rating than I have,” Biden joked to the Washington, DC crowd, referring to his own sub-40% polling and to surveys showing just 36% of Americans trust the mass media.

    This is insane, of course, on many levels. It is the inside joke, and the giant overt joke. This is the spokesperson for the free world, and these are the minutes they spend in their spare time. All puppets, all wind-up dolls, and the media, they are the lever pullers. Behind the media? Oh, man, you don’t need a recap on who the monster men (a few women, too) are?

    Okay, now down the other rabbit hole: Go to Alison McDowell’s work (Wrench in the Gears (dot) com) recently in Salt Lake City, following the LDS/Mormons capitalization of transhumanism, blockchain, social impact investing, cyber everything, internet of bodies, brains, babies. Slide show/stack here, Ignorance is Bliss?

    Check out 36 videos looking into this dispicable system of mind-matter-money control: Transhumanism, CIA Enslavement, Faith and Technology, Digital Education. YouTube.

    I have those discussions now, with former students, who want to know from me, what I think of Zoom Doom Rooms, or where I think education, both K12 and higher (sic), is going. Of course, the language we use is not always in synch, since I think the systems of education were flawed from the beginning, and that capitalism and fascism as it is delineated by GloboCap, set people up to accept lies, and the systems of oppression are about getting people to learn how to lie to themselves.

    I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
    ― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

    I talked recently with a teacher who knew me, and wondered where I was, in the substitute teacher stable. I informed her that this county, the school district, has banned me for pushing high school students to think about their own lives tied to stories like Of Mice and Men and Animal Farm, two books the teacher of record was having me, the substitute of record, work with. Amazing, I was frog marched out of the classroom and school, and there was zero recourse, no audience to be gained, and alas, I couldn’t defend myself: this is how one system of oppression works.

    This fourth grade teacher went on and on about how oppressive it is to be that elementary grade teacher in this district, and how the higher ups, the school board, they have scorn for the teachers, the paraeducators, the staff.

    Hell, I was teaching a community education class, and it took me more than a month and a half to be paid by the community college. This is the new normal, but not so new. This is the mentality whichruns the world. And, more and more people want to be their own boss, but their options are limited — really, a cinnamon roll shop, beads, candles, more deep fried oysters?

    Capitalism is lovely, so creative, open, available for smart small and tiny entrepeneurs. Wrong!

    Disdain, just like the fellow announcing that Reality Privilege is dead. The world of games, the world of on-line shopping, dating, hunting, driving, hiking, that is it for the world from here on in. Get on the phone, six hours a day, at least. Plug in.

    Zoom Zelensky from Britain or Poland. Watch Sean Penn or Pelosi fly into some staged area, then, long-live the ZioLenksy Nazi, and then, more dialing for dollars. Stage left, masks on, start themusic, do the edits, cut cut cut, and then let the lies fly.

    Reality. Here, from Farnam Street Articles!

    “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” wrote McLuhan. Rather they “alter patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”

    In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan proffered,

    “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”

    We see this today as newspapers transition to a digital world and how the medium—the internet—remakes the papers to fit its own standards. Not only have newspapers moved from physical to virtual but now they are hyperlinked, chunked, and embedded within noise. If he were alive (and healthy) McLuhan would argue these changes impact the way we understand the content.

    McLuhan foresaw how all mass media would eventually be used for commercialization and consumerism:

     “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”

    Carry on:

    CM 170: Nicholas Carr on What the Internet Does to Our Brains

    And, finally, reality is reality, all those down-home chemicals, cancers, catastrophies. A new outfit with the Environmental Working Group, The New Lede.   PFAS, Monsanto, other pesticides, all covered by investigative journalists. You can attempt to “virtual reality” away the reality world. These are freaks!  However, a hero like Carey Gillam has spent more than 25 years reporting on corporate America. She is the managing editor at The New Lede. Watch her over at RFK Jr’s site!

    Reality for Us, the Unprivileged.

    For a visitor to this rural part of eastern Nebraska, the crisp air, blue skies and stretch of seemingly endless farm fields appear as unspoiled landscape. For the people who live here, however, there is no denying that they are immersed in an environmental catastrophe researchers fear may impact the area for generations to come.

    The signs of a silent poisoning are everywhere: A farmhouse has been abandoned by its owners after their young children experienced health problems; a pond once filled with fish and frogs is now barren of all life; university researchers are collecting blood and urine from residents to analyze them for contaminants; and a local family now drinks water only from plastic bottles because tests show chemical contamination of their drinking well.  — Source, Carey Gillam

    No matter how many hours you might be connected to a gamefied world, virtual and augemented, the chemicals will still bore their toxins into your cells until no amount of AI-VR-AR can save you!

    Listen to these monsters . . .

    And then, four hours learning about this global brain mentality. Good work by Wrench In the Gears:

    And how many people are willing to go down these blockchain, decentralized technologies, social impact and reality priviledge and digital ID and crypo-funding? The Church of LDS is into Transhumanism. Keep your eye close on these folk, synthetic biology eugenics freaks.

    The post Reality Privileged: Orwell/Huxley/McLuhan on Steroids first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘The Core Of Copaganda Is The Symbiotic Relationship Between Press And Police’

    When the news got out that someone had shot people in New York City’s subway system, many of us knew just what would come next, and we were not surprised. Immediate, urgent calls for more police and more policing, for tougher treatment of homeless and/or mentally ill people. Forget tolerance or empathy or social services, because look where that gets us.

    It’s an argument that we’ve heard for decades, but it’s not an abstract debate. Just because patterns and practices are old doesn’t mean their harms are not fresh. So, yes, it matters very much whether the news convinces people that they’ve just been saved from lethal threat by, as the New York Times explained, “hundreds of officers from a multitude of agencies,” using methods “as modern as scrutinizing video from surveillance cameras and parsing electronic records, and as old-fashioned as a wanted poster.”

    The post ‘The Core Of Copaganda Is The Symbiotic Relationship Between Press And Police’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Most Joe Biden Thing Ever: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A hostile military alliance expanding to Russia’s borders isn’t a provocation, sending weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters backed by US intelligence isn’t a proxy war, those Nazis aren’t Nazis, you’re being censored for your own good, trust the media, the government is your friend.

    ❖

    It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.

    ❖

     

    Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women’s reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened.

    ❖

    Once you see that both mainstream US parties are part of a single oligarchic power structure it stops looking like a battle between opposing parties and looks more like one giant bully standing in front of voters saying “Let me hit you with my left fist or I’ll hit you with my right.”

    What is the correct response when that happens? What’s the correct response when a mainstream political party keeps communicating that they’ll never do anything to help you but you need to support them anyway or they’ll let their friends in the other mainstream political party take away your rights? Is it to say “Ah well the left fist won’t hurt as much so that’s clearly the lesser evil,” or is it to take on an oppositional relationship with the tyrant who keeps punching you with both fists year after year?

    ❖

    Learning about what’s wrong with the world is like watching a marathon of shitty Scooby Doo episodes from the sixties, except it’s way more repetitive and predictable, and the villain under the mask is always the US empire.

    ❖

    Western media keep shrieking about Russia’s nuclear threats as though it was some kind of secret that Russia will use nukes if it feels its existence is threatened, and as though western powers wouldn’t nuke Russia for the same reason.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only argument against the observation that the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure could easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost diplomatic concessions is “Actually Putin would have invaded anyway because he’s a cartoon supervillain who does evil things for no reason.”

    War is all the worst things that can happen to a person multiplied by the population you target. When you refuse diplomacy, you are condemning whole cities to unimaginable suffering.

    ❖

    Nobody actually believes “tankies” are dangerous, some people just have a deep psychological need for the US empire’s fiercest critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.

    ❖

     

    There’s a lot in the news right now but none of it is as important as the fact that we’re being shoved toward nuclear war for no good reason by a few idiots who want to rule the world.

    Again, the real risk of nuclear war is not that any side will deliberately start one but that the explicit agreement in “Mutually Assured Destruction” will be set into motion by a nuke being deployed by accident, miscommunication, miscalculation or malfunction as things escalate. During the last cold war such accidental nuclear exchanges came all too close to happening multiple times. The more tense the nuclear standoff gets, the greater the likelihood of such an event occurring:

    We survived the last cold war not by skill or by competence, but by sheer dumb luck. There’s no logical reason to assume we’ll get lucky again.

    ❖

    So yeah, just so we’re clear, the US empire is rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure iron-fisted control over our dominant narratives while it scrambles to subvert its rivals in cold war maneuverings and secure unipolar planetary hegemony.

    The primary purpose of expanding censorship and propaganda on subjects like Ukraine, Russia, Covid, extremism etc is not to control the narrative about those subjects specifically, but to expand and normalize censorship and propaganda. Narrative control is an end in itself, and it’s the absolute highest priority because all the empire’s power is built upon it.

    Few seem to understand that the oligarchic empire seeks narrative control as an end in itself. They’re not always necessarily increasing censorship and propaganda about a given topic because of that topic; it’s often mainly because they want to normalize and expand censorship and propaganda. Certainly there are narratives right here and now that the empire would rather we believe, but that’s of secondary strategic importance to ensuring ongoing and continually expanding control over all narratives around the world into the future.

    Not all powerful people support the same narratives, but all powerful people seek narrative control. Narrative control is power. Any manipulator understands this, from the most powerful oligarchs right down to the narcissistic gossip queen at the office.

    Any manipulator of any level spends an extraordinary amount of energy working to dominate the stories people tell about them and about others. This is because they know humans are storytelling creatures, and if you can control the stories they tell, you control the humans. This is most especially true of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States; its narrative control via corporate news media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley is completely unparalleled and historically unprecedented.

    Censorship, propaganda, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation are just different aspects of narrative control. Nobody does this as well as the US-centralized empire and its managers. Nobody ever has.

    _______________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • A Weird, Stupid Dystopia

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    The last few days in the United States have seen a parade of wealthy freaks fellating each other’s egos and preening for the cameras in outlandish garb while ordinary Americans suffer more and more.

    The weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner saw a gaggle of media celebrities congregate to congratulate one another on what a great job they’ve been doing bravely telling the truth and holding the most powerful government on earth to account. The host, Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, gushed with enthusiasm about how much freedom the press have in America to say things the powerful don’t like.

    “As we sit in this room tonight, people, I really hope you all remember what the real purpose of this evening is,” Noah said. “Yes, it’s fun. Yes, we dress nice. Yes, the people eat, they drink, we have fun. But the reason we’re here is to honor and celebrate the fourth estates and what you stand for — what you stand for — an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one.”

    “And if you ever begin to doubt your responsibilities, if you ever begin to doubt how meaningful it is, look no further than what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Noah. “Look at what’s happening there. Journalists are risking and even losing their lives to show the world what’s really happening. You realize how amazing it is. In America, you have the right to seek the truth and speak the truth even if it makes people in power uncomfortable, even if it makes your viewers or your readers uncomfortable. You understand how amazing that is? I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I am going to be fine, right? Do you really understand what a blessing it is?”

    Of course there are people who’ve said things that US presidents don’t like who are not in fact fine. Julian Assange continues to waste away in Belmarsh Prison as the US government continues its efforts to extradite him to he can become the first publisher ever tried under the Espionage Act. Edward Snowden, an American, remains in exile because one US president after another continues to refuse to pardon his heroic whistleblowing about the sinister surveillance practices of the US intelligence cartel. Daniel Hale, also an American, sits in prison for exposing the depravity of America’s monstrous drone program.

    Trevor Noah did not mention these people, or the many others who’ve been persecuted, silenced, imprisoned and killed for saying things the powerful individuals who govern the US don’t approve of, because as a member of the mainstream media his job is not to inform but to propagandize.

    Far from providing “an additional check and balance that holds power to account and gives voice to those who otherwise wouldn’t have one” as Noah claims, the people in his audience on Saturday night are tasked with manipulating public thought in facilitation of the interests of the powerful. The mainstream news media in America, and throughout all the so-called free democracies of the western world, are propaganda institutions whose first and foremost job is to manufacture consent for oligarchy and empire.

    Which is why the President of the United States, when he took the podium that night, had nothing but friendly words for the mainstream press.

    “What’s clear, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, is that you, the free press, matter more than you ever did in the last century,” Biden said. “We’ve all seen the courage of Ukrainian people because of the courage of American reporters in this room, and your colleagues across the world who are on the ground taking their lives in their own hands.”

    This past weekend also saw a friendly gathering of brave fourth estate truth warriors and political and government operatives of the US empire at a party hosted by the billionaire owner of the neocon war propaganda rag The Atlantic.

    Politico reports:

    David and Katherine Bradley and Laurene Powell Jobs hosted a dinner at the Bradleys’ home. SPOTTED: Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Cabinet Secretary Evan Ryan, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, CIA Director Bill Burns, press secretary Jen Psaki, Deputy A.G. Lisa Monaco, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands), homeland security adviser Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Jeffrey Goldberg, Nick Thompson, Peter Lattman, Anne Applebaum, Russell Berman, Franklin Foer, David Frum, Elaine Godfrey, Adam Harris, Mark Leibovich, Jeff Dufour, Heather Kuldell, Kevin Baron, José Andrés, Enes Kanter, Mitch Landrieu, Dafna Linzer, Rachel Martin, Judy Woodruff, Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, Jonathan Capehart, Katty Kay, Steve and Jean Case, John Dickerson and Jen Palmieri.

    Yep, when you see a shady basketball player/empire propagandist fraternizing with the CIA Director while surrounded by media celebrities and government insiders at a party hosted by a media-owning plutocrat, you know you’re in a country where power is held to account. Right, Trevor?

    The orgy of embarrassment was capped off by the 2022 Met Gala, a big weird dystopian parade of rich freaks dressed like Hunger Games aristocracy and laughing in the face of everyone who can’t afford to live.

    An honest Met Gala dress would have a corset made from the bones of Yemeni children, draped with a cloth of stolen gold and lithium spun by the tiny hands of child slaves, with a full-length train that leached oil and blood wherever it went.

    This while ordinary Americans struggle just to survive. While American women appear to be on the precipice of losing their reproductive sovereignty. While money is poured into a proxy war which threatens to escalate into a conflict that could easily end all life on earth.

    This is your dying empire, America. This is your end-stage capitalism. This is your dystopia, in all its weird, phony, stupid glory.

    It is horrifying. The longer you look at it, the creepier it gets.

    Breathe it all in, folks.

    We’re in for a hell of a ride.

    _____________________

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

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Media freedom slide in Australia ‘undermining’ ability to project democratic values

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    A Melbourne-based Indonesian media academic has warned that declining media freedom in Australia is undermining the country’s ability to project liberal democratic values to the Asia-Pacific region.

    “Many people who have been watching media and journalism in Australia have been worried,” Tito Ambyo, a journalism lecturer at RMIT, told ABC News.

    He said governments in Australia needed “to start seeing journalists as an important part of democracy”.

    “We don’t have journalists being killed or imprisoned in Australia, but we have seen a lot of abuses,” he said, pointing to online harassment that was “often racist or gendered in nature”.

    Ambyo was responding to the 2022 World Press Freedom Index released this week by the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders which reported a big slump in media freedoms in Australia.

    Media freedom in Australia is “fragile” and less protected than in New Zealand and several emerging democracies in Asia, RSF concluded in its annual Index. The assessment measures have become more comprehensive in changes introduced this year.

    Australia slid from 25 to 39 in the Index, ranking below New Zealand in 11th place and Timor-Leste at number 17, but above Samoa (45th), Tonga (49th), Papua New Guinea (62nd) and Fiji (102nd) — with both the latter Pacific countries experiencing big falls while facing elections this year.

    Taiwan, which has transitioned from a military dictatorship to a liberal democracy since the late 1980s, ranked just above Australia at 38th.

    The Press Freedom Index, which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories, highlights the disastrous effects of news and information chaos — the effects of a globalised and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda.

    ‘Fox News model’
    Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the “Fox News model” and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions.

    At the international level, democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies.

    Polarisation on these two levels is fuelling increased tension, says RSF.

    The invasion of Ukraine (106th) by Russia (155th) at the end of February reflects this process, as the physical conflict was preceded by a propaganda war.

    China (175th), one of the world’s most repressive autocratic regimes, uses its legislative arsenal to confine its population and cut it off from the rest of the world, especially the population of Hong Kong (148th), which has plummeted in the Index.

    Confrontation between “blocs” is growing, as seen between nationalist Narendra Modi’s India (150th) and Pakistan (157th). The lack of press freedom in the Middle East continues to impact the conflict between Israel (86th), Palestine (170th) and the Arab states.

    Media polarisation is feeding and reinforcing internal social divisions in democratic societies such as the United States (42nd), despite President Joe Biden’s election, reports RSF.

    Social media tensions
    The increase in social and political tension is being fuelled by social media and new opinion media, especially in France (26th).

    The suppression of independent media is contributing to a sharp polarisation in “illiberal democracies” such as Poland (66th), where the authorities have consolidated their control over public broadcasting and their strategy of “re-Polonising” the privately-owned media.

    The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index — Norway, Denmark and Sweden — continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes, while Moldova (40th) and Bulgaria (91st) stand out this year thanks to a government change and the hope it has brought for improvement in the situation for journalists even if oligarchs still own or control the media.

    The situation is classified as “very bad” in a record number of 28 countries in this year’s Index, while 12 countries, including Belarus (153rd) and Russia (155th), are on the Index’s red list (indicating “very bad” press freedom situations) on the map.

    The world’s 10 worst countries for press freedom include Myanmar (176th), where the February 2021 coup d’état set press freedom back by 10 years, as well as China, Turkmenistan (177th), Iran (178th), Eritrea (179th) and North Korea (180th).

    Fatal danger for democracies
    “Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT (the former Russia Today), revealed what she really thinks in a Russia One TV broadcast when she said, ‘no great nation can exist without control over information,’ said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

    “The creation of media weaponry in authoritarian countries eliminates their citizens’ right to information but is also linked to the rise in international tension, which can lead to the worst kind of wars.

    “Domestically, the ‘Fox News-isation’ of the media poses a fatal danger for democracies because it undermines the basis of civil harmony and tolerant public debate,” he said.

    “Urgent decisions are needed in response to these issues, promoting a New Deal for Journalism, as proposed by the Forum on Information and Democracy, and adopting an appropriate legal framework, with a system to protect democratic online information spaces.”

    Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • More Escalations In Online Censorship

    There’s no sensible argument that this new escalation in censorship is saving lives or that it’s being

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.