Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 02, 2025 6:26 pm

Collapsing empire: RIP CIA front’s ‘overt operations’

The National Endowment for Democracy, a supposedly ‘non-governmental organisation’, is in reality an overt front for the CIA.
Kit Klarenburg

Friday 31 January 2025

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It is sign of US imperialist decline that the NED has felt the need to hide details of activities which it formerly published openly. The understanding that ‘spreading democracy’ is imperialist doublespeak for ‘overthrowing governments with sovereign ambitions’ has simply become too widespread for the CIA’s ‘overt operations’ front to continue in its old way.

Reproduced from Global Delinquents, with thanks.

*****

In recent months, a remarkable development in US imperialism’s decline has gone almost entirely unnoticed. The National Endowment for Democracy’s (NED) grant database has been removed from the web.

Until recently, a searchable interface allowed visitors to view detailed records of Washington-funded NGOs, civil society groups, and media projects in particular countries – covering most of the world – the sums involved, and entities responsible for delivering these initiatives. This resource has now inexplicably vanished, and with it, enormous amounts of incontrovertible, self-incriminating evidence of destructive US skullduggery abroad.

Take for example NED grant records for Georgia, the site of recent repeated colour revolution efforts, at the forefront of which were endowment-bankrolled organisations. While still accessible via internet archives, they were deleted during the summer. Today, visitors to associated URLs are redirected to a brief entry simply titled “Eurasia”. The accompanying text describes in very broad terms the endowment’s aims regionally and the total being spent, but the crucial questions of where and on what aren’t clarified.

In a comic hypocrisy too, the blurb boldly states: “The heart of NED’s work in the region is the need to maintain access to objective information for local populations. Across the region, government actors are attempting to limit the space for citizens to distribute information and communicate freely online.”

Resultantly, independent academics, activists, researchers and journalists have been deprived of an invaluable resource for tracking and exposing imperialist machinations. Yet the endowment incinerating its public paper trail can only be considered a significant victory for these same actors. NED’s explicit and avowed raison d’être was to do publicly what US intelligence did – and in many cases still does – covertly.

Now, after 40 years of wreaking havoc worldwide via ‘overt operations’ in service of empire, the CIA front has been forced underground, defeating its entire purpose. How long can it now survive?

‘Spyless coups’
The NED was founded in November 1983, after the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) became embroiled in a series of embarrassing public scandals. Then-Agency director William Casey was central to its construction. His objective was to create a public mechanism to conduct traditional CIA meddling overseas, except out in the open.

Ever since, the endowment has financed countless opposition groups, activist movements, media outlets and trade unions to the tune of untold millions to engage in propaganda and political activism – to disrupt, destabilise and displace ‘enemy’ regimes the world over.

The NED’s true nature was openly acknowledged by mainstream media for many years. In June 1986, longtime endowment president Carl Gershman told the New York Times that “it would be terrible for democratic groups around the world” to be subsidised by the CIA.

Past exposure of such connivances meant that they had been ‘discontinued’, and farmed out to the NED. Several high-ranking interviewees strenuously denied there was any connection between the NED and the Agency, although the outlet acknowledged that many endowment programmes seemed ‘superficially similar’ to past CIA operations.

At this time, the NED was hard at work killing off communism in the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact countries and Yugoslavia. This included, for instance, enormous investment in Poland’s infamous Solidarity trade union, which became a global emblem of anticommunist ‘resistance’.

In September 1991, the Washington Post published a highly laudatory appraisal of these efforts, stating that the “political miracles” the endowment had achieved in the former Soviet sphere had ushered in a “new world of spyless coups” and “innocence abroad”:

“The old era of covert action is dead. The world doesn’t run in secret anymore. We are now living in the age of Overt Action … When such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection. Covert funding for these groups would have been the kiss of death, if discovered. Overt funding, it would seem, has been a kiss of life.”

The NED proceeded to take down a number of governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s, very overtly. In many cases, mainstream outlets published highly revealing accounts detailing precisely how.

In Ukraine in November 2004, endowment-trained and bankrolled activists forced a rerun of that year’s presidential election to install a pro-western puppet. As the Guardian jubilantly reported, the entire effort was “an American creation”; a “sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing”, which had been repeatedly deployed in the new millennium to “topple unsavoury regimes”.

“Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations … the operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections.”

‘Kiss of death’
The next year, USAid published a glossy magazine, Democracy Rising, bragging extensively about how it and the NED had been fundamental to a wave of insurrectionary upheaval in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Yugoslavia and elsewhere during the first years of the 21st century. Fast forward to February 2014, and Ukraine’s government once again fell victim to an endowment-orchestrated coup in the form of the Maidan ‘revolution’. Yet the media either ignored the irrefutable US role in fomenting the upheaval, or dismissed the proposition as “Russian disinformation” or conspiracy theory.

This is despite contemporary polls never showing majority Ukrainian support for the Maidan protests; ousted President Viktor Yanukovych remaining the most popular politician in the country until his last day in office; every actor at Maidan’s forefront, including the individuals who started the demonstrations, receiving NED or USAid funding; leaders of Washington-financed organisations in the country openly advertising their desire to overthrow Yanukovych in the years before; and the endowment pumping around $20m into the country in 2013 alone.

A Maidan crowd
This mass omertà, which has intensified since, may be attributable to ever-rising hostility towards the NED by foreign governments and populations, and associated efforts to restrict or outright proscribe the organisation. The reality of the endowment’s raison d’être and modus operandi has thus not only become unsayable, but must be vehemently denied by western journalists.

Representatively, a July 2015 Guardian report on Russia banning the NED quite unbelievably relied on a brief quote from the endowment’s own website to describe its operations.

While the mainstream media may have remained silent on the NED’s mephitic influence overseas over the past decade, the same is not true of dissident academics, activists, researchers, and journalists. The endowment grant database served as an invaluable tool for keeping a close eye on Washington’s international intrigues, and mapping the personal and organisational connections of NED-sponsored agents and entities of influence. Meanwhile, the endowment’s status as a CIA front could be simply proven, via multiple public admissions of its own leaders.

Whenever protests erupted somewhere in the world and received widespread western news coverage, concerned citizens could consult the NED grant database and find in the overwhelming majority of cases that most if not all individuals and groups quoted in associated media reports were in receipt of endowment funding. While difficult to quantify, it would be unsurprising if dissident voices calling attention to this fact has helped to avert colour revolution efforts, disrupted meddling campaigns, protected popular governments and political figures, and more.

Of course, despite the NED brazenly purging evidence of its vast operations from the web, its conniving continues apace regardless – now, covertly. One might even argue that the endowment’s chicanery is all the more dangerous as a result, given that individuals and organisations can conceal their funding sources.

But the move amply shows that the NED today cannot withstand the slightest public scrutiny, which its existence was intended to exemplify. It also demonstrates that ‘overt operations’ with open US funding are now the very ‘kiss of death’ the endowment was meant to replace.

The empire is on the run.

https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/31/ne ... ns-hidden/

******

Did a Trump Executive Order Just Cripple the Global US Regime Change Network?
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 31, 2025
Kit Klarenberg

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With federal funding paused to USAID, pro-Western media outlets from Ukraine to Nicaragua are panhandling for donations, and a multi-billion dollar regime change apparatus is in panic mode.

Among the flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in the first days of his administration, perhaps the most consequential to date is one titled, “reevaluating and realigning US foreign aid.”

Under this order, a 90-day pause was instantly enforced on all US foreign development assistance across the globe – excepting, of course, the largest recipients of US aid in Israel and Egypt. For now, the order forbids the disbursement of federal funding for any “non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors” charged with delivering US “aid” programs overseas.

Within days, hundreds of “internal contractors” at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were placed on unpaid leave or outright fired, as a direct result of the Executive Order. Washington Post contributor John Hudson has reported organization officials brand Trump’s directives on “foreign development assistance” a “shock and awe approach,” which has left them reeling, uncertain of their futures. One nameless USAID apparatchik told him, “they even removed all the pictures in our offices of aid programs,” as accompanying photographs attested.

NEW: The order that removed dozens of senior USAID leaders earlier this week was rescinded today by a career USAID official who called the purge “illegal” and a violation of “due process.” That official has now been put on administrative leave. I obtained his email to staff,… pic.twitter.com/E1OuyVyox7

— John Hudson (@John_Hudson) January 31, 2025


While the Trump administration’s purge sent shockwaves through Washington’s international development corps and the Beltway Bandits which feed at its trough, the sudden severing of USAID money has sparked panic overseas. From Latin America to Eastern Europe, the US has pumped billions into NGO’s and media outlets to fuel color revolutions and assorted regime change operations, all in the name of “democracy promotion.”

Now, as the global apparatus of soft American power trumpeted by President George H.W. Bush as “a thousand points of light” goes dark, supposedly independent media outfits from Ukraine to Nicaragua are fretting about their future and panhandling for donations on their websites.

US-backed media and opposition face extinction in Ukraine

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has pumped billions into Ukraine to create and propel a fervently anti-Russian opposition. As former State Department Assistant Secretary for Eastern European Affairs Victoria Nuland remarked to an oil industry-sponsored meeting in Kiev in 2009, “we’ve invested $5 billion to assist Ukraine” to “build democratic skills and institutions” allowing it to “achieve European independence.”

The US flooded Ukrainian civil society with grants on the eve of the 2014 Maidan coup, birthing a network of pro-Western media outlets almost overnight. Among them was Hromadske, a liberal broadcasting entity which pushed for the overthrow of President Victor Yanukovych and rallied for the subsequent war with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east – including through the glorification of Nazis who fought the Soviet Red Army during World War II.

Hromadske funded & launched by US Embassy, European Commission, Omidyar Network, Soros — allegedly to fight against “Russian information war”. Now it’s glorifying Ukraine’s Nazis https://t.co/LCpvKgtEzN

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) April 30, 2018


With Trump’s executive order cutting off USAID programs, Hromadske has suddenly been severed from its financial tube. So too have the top Ukrainian media outlets which emerged in the wake of the Maidan coup, including Ukrinform, Internews, and a signatory of the Poynter-run International Fact Checking Network called VoxUkraine.

The Ministry of Culture and Strategic Communications and the Service of the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, both created to propagandize for war against Russia, are also among USAID funding recipients now starving for cash.

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky took to Twitter/X to whine that “critically important programs” wholly dependent on “US support” were now “suspended” as a result of Trump’s executive order. He promised that “certain key initiatives” would “be financed through our internal resources,” while begging for donations from Kiev’s “European partners” to be “intensified.”

Given Ukraine’s near-total economic destruction since its proxy war against Russia erupted in February 2022, and complete reliance on USAID to pay the salaries of state employees, it is uncertain how the country’s “internal resources” can possibly be used to even vaguely offset its sudden deficit. Already, major Ukrainian media outlets are pleading for financial support from their readers just to keep their lights on.

According to Kiev’s foreign-funded Institute of Mass Information, around 90% of the country’s media is “dependent on American grants.”

Contra 2.0 gravy train paused in Nicaragua

Similar bleating has emanated from US-financed organizations in Nicaragua, where since the re-election of popular leftist Sandinista Front in 2006, Washington has pumped tens of millions of dollars into right-wing media outlets and opposition groups.

In tandem, these foreign-funded fifth columnists routinely disseminate disinformation, while inciting violence against the government and its supporters, and influencing Western media reporting on the country.

As The Grayzone reported, a USAID-funded Nicaraguan opposition outlet called 100% Noticias led a campaign of violent incitement throughout 2018, when a failed US-backed coup attempt left hundreds dead in the country. While the outlet repeatedly featured calls for the murder of President Daniel Ortega, its director, Miguel Mora, told The Grayone’s Max Blumenthal he wished for a US military intervention of the country to topple the elected government. When the Nicaraguan government finally shuttered the station and prosecuted Mora, Washington responded with accusations of repression and threats of heavy sanctions.

The US government poured tens of millions of dollars into violent far-right groups and media outlets that published fake news to fuel a brutal 2018 coup attempt against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.

Now they’re facing legal consequences.

Full video: https://t.co/19eH7QeUF9 pic.twitter.com/bPf5RcizOV

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) June 16, 2021


On January 21, an anti-Sandinista “news” operations called Nicaragua Investiga warned that Trump’s order “threatens to deal a severe blow” to the country and its anti-Ortega crusade, “which depends heavily on the financial and technical support provided by agencies” such as USAID. This backing, the outlet declared, was a “fundamental pillar” in the Nicaraguan right-wing’s efforts to undermine and depose the anti-imperialist President.

“Civil society organisations that rely on this assistance would be forced to reduce or cease their activities,” Nicaragua Investiga warned. The outlet further lamented that “uncertainty reigns over how and when assistance will be restored, and whether organizations critical of Daniel Ortega’s regime that still survive outside the country will be able to maintain their operations.”

Not coincidentally, Nicaragua Investiga was among the local outlets which largely depended on US government grants for their existence.

Has the US balked at balkanizing the Balkans?

Across the West Balkans, USAID, self-avowed CIA front the National Endowment for Democracy, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the panoply of NGOs and media outlets have infiltrated every conceivable sphere of public life. Following the 1992 – 1995 civil war, Bosnia and Herzegovina was methodically transformed into a de facto EU and US colony, with all basic functions of the state hijacked by foreign interests.

Some concern about the imperial project found its way into mainstream media at the time. The New York Times warned in 1998 that US domination of Bosnia “raised troubling questions about how the state will work without continued infusions of outside aid and direct international supervision.” A senior foreign government advisor angsted over Washington’s lack of exit strategy in the country, or any plan to end “Bosnia’s culture of dependency.” Today, at least 25,600 Western-funded NGOs are active in Sarajevo.

The pause in “foreign development assistance” has placed countless jobs and beneficiary organizations at risk of permanent erasure across the Balkans. On January 30, Balkan Insight – an outlet exposed by The Grayzone as a tentacle of British intelligence – published an illuminating investigation into how the aid pause “has immediately affected a range of organisations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.”

From 2020 until the end of 2024, Washington has funnelled a staggering $1.7 billion into the West Balkans, “supporting civil society organisations and state institutions and projects ranging from human rights and media to energy efficiency,” with next to no demonstrable social benefit. Now, “all projects have been halted…until the evaluation period is over.” Expenses up until January 27 will be covered, “while everything after that has to be stopped.” Already, layoffs and huge pay cuts have been enacted at recipient entities.

Nameless NGO workers consulted by Balkan Insight fretted that the US financing freeze would not be temporary. One source speculated the Executive Order could be “just a soft way of cutting these funds permanently.” The outlet noted Washington “has supported thousands of activities” in the region, and “the precise number of affected projects” remains “unknown”. When reporters contacted local USAID offices seeking clarity on the cuts, they were redirected in every instance to the agency’s Washington headquarters.

USAID base camp “responded by sending a link to its press release” on the funding pause. “President Trump stated clearly that the US is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people,” it bluntly declared. “Reviewing and realigning foreign assistance on behalf of hardworking taxpayers is not just the right thing to do, it is a moral imperative.” Evidently, the new administration is not remotely concerned that entire sectors of local economies in the Balkans have been effectively shuttered.

Even in Albania – a doggedly pro-US country with an influential DC lobby – 30 Washington-subsidized projects have been suspended, including bankrolling of “courts, prosecutor’s offices and the ministries of Defence, Education and Sports, and Finance.” In Macedonia – where “most” US funding is distributed via USAID and NED – $72 million allocated to 22 projects is “now on hold.” Six wider regional USAID-backed initiatives in the Balkans, which also covers Macedonia, “worth some $140 million”, are likewise mothballed. In local terms, these sums are monumental.

Georgia not on the Trump admin’s mind

The Republic of Georgia has been the site of a series of color revolution efforts since the start of 2023, all in response to the government’s successful push to compel the more than 25,000 foreign-financed organizations in the country to disclose their funding sources. Western-backed NGOs and activist groups have been at the forefront of all these attempted putsches. Unsurprisingly, this shadow army of previously US-funded foot soldiers are furious about the Trump administration’s “foreign development assistance” cutoff.

By contrast, the Georgian government appears delighted. Parliamentary leader Mamuka Mdinaradze has even suggested the highly controversial law on foreign funding transparency “might not be needed at all anymore” after Trump’s executive order. Indeed, with untold foreign-sponsored chaos agents suddenly out of money, the color revolution coast is now clear in Tbilisi.

On January 30, local English language publication Georgia Today published a leader mourning that, “as the future of their funding hangs in the balance, aid organizations are already laying off or furloughing staff,” and “some programs” in Tbilisi “may struggle to restart after this temporary shutdown, with many potentially disappearing permanently.” It went on to note USAID financing “has been a cornerstone of the country’s development since 1992, with over $1.9 billion in assistance provided to date.”

Prior to the funding pause, USAID alone was “investing in 39 programs across the country, with a total value of $373 million and an annual budget exceeding $70 million.” These efforts overwhelmingly focused “on promoting economic reforms” and “fostering private sector investment,” which is to say facilitating foreign financial rape and pillage of Georgia.

While domestic critics of Trump’s Executive Order have lambasted Washington’s resultant loss of expansive “soft power” influence in the Global South, such retreat can only be to the enormous benefit of target countries. As a LeftEast essay noted, foreign-funded NGOs have for decades “eroded Georgian citizens’ agency and the country’s sovereignty and democracy.” Its authors explained, “Activists in Georgia know all too well what is expected of them and which behaviors are punished and rewarded: being critical of the government on Facebook will net you more grants than being out in the community helping people… Donors even monitor activists’ social media profiles, and there can be consequences for posting the wrong things.”

However, the relief could be premature for populations that have suffered decades of US “foreign development assistance,” and the attendant coups and unrest it has paid for. The “pause” on US aid may indeed be a temporary measure, or, spending on soft power could be redirected to harder options with even more grave repercussions across the world.



https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/01/ ... e-network/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 03, 2025 3:42 pm

With Zero Evidence, NPR Suggests Trump May ‘Work for Working Class’ in Second Term
Jim Naureckas

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NPR: Can Trump's 2nd act work for the working class while giving back to his super donors?
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NPR (2/1/25) investigates how a politician who surrounds himself with fellow billionaires can “work for the working class.” NPR‘s suggestion: tax cuts for the very wealthy.
“Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!

Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:

Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!

Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:

Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.

But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:

If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.

But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”

So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?

All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!

https://fair.org/home/with-zero-evidenc ... cond-term/

'National Propaganda Radio, for people who think they are smart'... Yes I once was a fan, but my doubts started with the war against Yugoslavia. Whatever good qualities it once had were gone with Newt's Contract On America.

Trump's 'populism' will fade quickly as he no longer needs the votes of the great unwashed, he will be guided by egoism, cupidity and resentment. In this he is not a normal politician, who are guided in their actions by the ruling class faction that owns them. Rather he is ruling class arrogance without any governance, which is how they like it. To put it in terms a Roman senator would agree with Trump has 'liberty, the right to do anything he wishes. Truly, the avatar of his class.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 04, 2025 2:52 pm

BBC: the voice of the viscerally anti-Russian British Government
gilbertdoctorow Uncategorized February 1, 2025

Today I call attention to the BBC’s role as the voice of the British Deep State.

The ‘free market’ British media, despite their anti-Russian predisposition, have of late joined U.S. print and electronic mainstream in accepting the inevitable and, likely, soon to come defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia. The non-state British press, which also includes the stiff-upper-lip Financial Times reporting, by the way, is now often giving useful and truthful accounts day by day on how the war is proceeding.

However, do not look for ‘useful and truthful accounts’ from the BBC. They are serving another agenda which is to maintain hostility to Russia whatever happens next in the war and the peace that follows.

I was prompted to write this brief essay by the remarkably tendentious and mendacious half hour BBC One television program on the Russia-Ukraine war that John Simpson presented within his weekly series entitled, no irony intended, ‘Unspun World.’ Though Simpson may have spoiled my breakfast, I was prompted to return to the crime scene. And so I sat myself down before my computer and looked up the program on the BBC’s website to have another go at it. There I found the following link to the Sound version of the broadcast, which served my purposes adequately for what follows. I salute those of you who can locate the video version.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct5yc9
I compare this latest BBC work of fiction with the most recent article on the war by Luke Harding writing in The Guardian. For those who do not know Harding, he has long been notorious for his anti-Putin, anti-Russian writings. By his own admission, he was ‘the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War.” That was back in 2011. He has not changed his stripes, but, judging by the article below, he has gotten better prescription glasses.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/ ... ion-crisis
*****

At the very start of today’s ‘Unspun World,’ which he recorded in Riga, Latvia, outside of Russia, Simpson sets out his overarching themes:

How the war has affected Russian society: “Disturbingly, the war is turning entire groups within Russian society into enemies of the state.”
Who is winning?: “President Putin…took the decision to invade back in February 2022 on the basis of some really bad advice and some totally false assumptions. He was lucky to survive an attempted coup by the Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023. And he’s had to recruit prisoners, North Koreans and Iran’s drone technicians just in order to keep going. But has the war now turned decisively in Putin’s favor?”
He begins his reportage by interviewing Sergei Goryashko, whom the BBC website describes as a member of their news team in Riga where he was transferred with other staff at the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. However, whatever salary he gets, it would be accurate to call him a ‘stringer.’ His name turns up as a contributor to numerous online media and he has authored many articles for Politico, especially on the death of Alexei Navalny and on the continuation of his cause by Navalny’s widow. He also could be called a turncoat. He is a Russian, a graduate in journalism of Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, and with his journalistic work for the BBC crossing all the red lines for enemies of the state, he will not be heading back to Mother Russia.

Note that Riga is an offshore nest for British news agencies covering Russia. That is the present home base of the Financial Times’ own genuine Briton, Max Seddon, who wears the nominal title of FT Moscow bureau chief though I have not seen any articles of his with byline Moscow. Note, too, that Simpson did not take testimony for today’s program from the BBC’s bureau chief, Steve Rosenberg, who returned to his offices in Moscow more than a year ago after being reassured that it was safe to do so. Rosenberg can be aggressive in his questioning of Vladimir Putin at press conferences, but is careful with what he says on air otherwise to maintain his privileged position inside Russia. Simpson faces no such constraints reporting from abroad.

It is interesting that Simpson’s chat with Goryashko assumes that Putin will win his war and turns our attention to whether the peace which follows will allow the Russians to attack the West thereafter. Goryashko obliges, saying “I cannot rule out the possibility that Putin will try to invade the Baltics, for instance….What is scary here is not that he would try to invade but that if the Alliance would not stand up….That would make him realize that the Alliance as everyone thought it exists actually does not exist and nothing can stop him to redraw the borders in Europe.”

Well said, Goryashko!

Simpson then moved on to his second issue, the impact of the war on Russian society. As he notes, “Wars tend to have a brutalizing effect on the societies that launch them. It has been particularly true in Putin’s Russia, where thousands upon thousands of murderers and violent criminals have been taken out of jail and put into uniform.”

He explores this with Nina Nazarova, another Russian ‘exile’ working for BBC Russian in Riga. She describes the case of a young man who murdered his girlfriend somewhere in the Russian Far East, was sentenced to 17 years in prison but a year later accepted recruitment by the Wagner mercenary group and was released from prison by Putin to go fight in Ukraine. From this she concludes that some kind of major social experiment was started in a country of 140 million people, telling us that the very idea of justice was cancelled there. And so “people have to adapt to this new society without any rules.”

Simpson throws out the idea that with Donald Trump coming to power there is the possibility that the war will be over fairly soon ‘in some form or another.’ And so, he continues: “how difficult will it be to get back into some form of normal life again?” Nazarova’s answer: “There have been changes in Russian society that are irrevocable… The war has scarred Russian society for a long time.” Nazarova closes her remarks by saying that she has no intention of returning to Russia.

Simpson turns to his next witness, an investigator into social trends in Russia for BBC Russian, Aleksandra Golubeva, to discuss what he calls ‘a particularly ugly process which governments with their back to the wall are often tempted to encourage – the isolation and persecution of minorities and return to older, supposedly better values.” The minorities in question are….LGBT. The government with its back to the wall must be Putin’s.

However, their discussion starts first on a different topic – what Golubeva calls Putin’s obsession with historical truth.

Golubeva: “They [Putin and his men] see historical truth as an information weapon or information tool and they want…to set history straight as they see fit.”

Simpson: “In the interests of Stalin and the Stalin dictatorship?”

Golubeva: “Those who write and try to speak about Soviet repressions and nowadays repressions, they are simply viewed as enemies.”

It is curious that ‘historical truth’ is so dangerous and can be ‘weaponized.’ This stands in stark contrast to the Kremlin’s denunciation of Western amnesia over the Nazi past and present in its own midst during the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz and the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad 10 days ago.

Simpson next moved on to the question of how LGBT people are treated today in Russia.

Golubeva: “In every aspect of life [the Kremlin] is dividing people into enemies and friends. Black and white. Good and bad. LGBT people and the LGBT movement are considered extremists in Russia, alongside with Navalny, and some horrible terrorist organizations in the world.”

With that, Simpson seems to have run out of dirt on Putin’s Russia and the last third of the program consists of his own personal reminiscences on how Russia has changed since his periodic visits there starting in the 1970s and running through the Yeltsin years. To show whereof he speaks, Simpson includes an excerpt from a televised report he made from Moscow during the attempted coup to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1981.

He says this about the Yeltsin years:

“The economic horrors of the 1990s explain a great deal about how older Russians support Putin even now.”

Turning to the Putin years: “You could make a good case saying all of this, the social problems, the brutality, Putin’s sense of insecurity and his need to even the score all come from the way the old Soviet Union ground to a halt”

And this is what resulted: “Although [Putin] at first seemed friendly to the West and Western ideas, he soon showed signs of resentment and hostility. In 2014, ignoring a treaty which Yeltsin had signed to respect the borders of an independent Ukraine, I watched as Putin used mercenaries in Crimea to cut it off from Ukraine and turn it into a Russian possession. This is the new reality, today’s reality….When in 2022 he finally invaded Ukraine, apparently believing the people there wanted to join up with Russia again, the Cold War turned uncomfortably warm. Volodymyr Zelensky staged an extraordinarily strong resistance to the Russian invasion. I went to Kiev soon afterwards to interview him for ‘Unspun World.”

This narrative takes us swiftly to Simpson’s key learnings from the past three years of war: “Over the three years since then, the Russians have upped their game. With the help of China, Iran and North Korea. Now the question is how President Trump, who has often expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin will achieve his intended aim of bringing the war to an end fast. In all of this the key factor has been the way the old Soviet Union collapsed. The humiliations, the economic devastation, the resentment. Everything now depends on the way Putin emerges from a Trump organized peace negotiation over Ukraine. If he is seen as the winner, or at least not the loser, he’ll be free to continue challenging the West.”

Simpson concludes his report with a look at the other side of the coin: what happens if Putin fails to recapture one part of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine. He tells us that in Latvia, from where he is reporting, a lot of people are afraid that then he will turn his attention to the Baltic States. Thinking aloud, Simpson asks whether President Trump, with his concern to put America First, really cares very much if Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia are taken. And will Trump care if Putin starts up his invasion of Ukraine again.

There you have it. Avuncular as he may wish to sound, Simpson is saying what the British Deep State would like you to hear: Russia as a threat if it wins…and also if it loses in Ukraine. Russia is an ugly, distorted society that deserves to remain a pariah, kept away by a high wall of sanctions. The only positive note that I flag in this report is Simpson’s understanding that the game is up and Ukraine is losing the war.

*****

I recommend Luke Harding’s article entitled “Everybody is tired. The mood has changed: the Ukrainian Army’s desertion crisis.” It is an easy read and I will not take your time to summarize its contents other than to say that Harding has done something admirable and unexpected given his long record as a Russia hater: while in Kiev he interviewed a number of army deserters and he tells their stories with considerable empathy, maybe even sympathy. This tells us that the game is up for the Kiev regime. At least Harding does not dabble in what Russia, as winner, may do to us all.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 05, 2025 3:07 pm

Washington’s unstoppable superweapon

It is not only their physical independence that countries must protect from imperialist domination but also their civil and information sovereignty.
Brian Berletic

Wednesday 5 February 2025

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As imperialism’s military strength fades in relation to that of its adversaries, its remaining critical strength lies in the sphere of information warfare and ‘civil society’ penetration operations as a precursor to regime change.

This article is reproduced from New Eastern Outlook with thanks. While the author is not a Marxist, and therefore does not draw Marxist conclusions, his systematic and honest investigations into the roots and purposes of US activities around the world, whether military or via the ‘peaceful’ methods described below, provide valuable insights for those wishing to understand and struggle against imperialism in the 21st century.

*****

In recent months, even across the collective west’s media, growing admissions are being made about both Russia and China’s superior military industrial capacity. With Russia’s first use of the intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, it is admitted that Russia (and likely China) possess formidable military capabilities the collective west currently lacks.

Despite the collective efforts of Nato in arming, training and backing Ukraine, Ukrainian forces continue to give ground at an accelerated rate across the entire line of contact amid the ongoing Russian special military operation (SMO).

Yet, even as this new paradigm sinks in, the USA has demonstrated that it still possesses a powerful and so far unparalleled and yet unanswered superweapon. It used it to create conditions across the Arab world to slowly and steadily hollow out both the Syrian economy and the Syrian Arab Army, resulting in the total collapse of both in mid-December 2024 after years of staving off US-backed terrorists attempting to overrun the country.

Not only did the Syrian economy, army and thus government collapse, many across the world cheered on as UN-listed terrorist organisations seized power in Damascus and publicly carried out atrocities in Syria’s streets against ethnic, religious and political opponents.

All of this is owed to Washington’s unanswered ‘superweapon’ and its control over global information and political space.

Washington’s superweapon: political interference, capture and control
Not as glamorous as an Oreshnik missile, Washington’s superweapon is, in fact, many times more powerful, and more difficult to defend against.

Beginning as regime change operations carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it has transformed over the years into what is now known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED oversees a network of subsidiaries (Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI)) as well as adjacent government organisations (USAid) and private foundations (Open Society, Omidyar Network), which fund hundreds of organisations, projects, opposition groups and political parties on every inhabited continent on Earth.

The middle east: setting the battlefield for war with Iran
In recent years, it trained armies of agitators years ahead of the 2011 ‘Arab spring’ to return to their home nations and overthrow their respective governments. The political turmoil these US-backed agitators created was leveraged by likewise US-backed armed extremists to violently depose governments that refused to cave to political pressure.

While the NED’s own website claims that it “promotes freedom around the world”, its political interference has destabilised and destroyed entire nations and even whole regions of the planet, leading to hundreds of thousands of dead and millions more displaced. What is left of the targeted nations is rendered into an internally warring failed state or a client regime serving Washington’s interests, or sometimes a combination of both – entirely at the expense of the targeted nation’s own best interests.

The region itself is taking a very deliberate shape aimed at encircling, isolating and eventually targeting and toppling the nation of Iran, which represents the centre of resistance to US hegemony in the region.

NED in Europe: creating a ‘democratic’ Russia
Another example is Ukraine. Efforts by the US NED to overthrow an independent and neutral Ukraine began as early as 2004, as reported at the time by the Guardian. An identical operation repeated itself in 2014, and this time it succeeded. It included not only NED-funded political agitators but also armed extremists including neo-nazis, who were joined on stage by US senators cheering them on in Kiev.

The purpose of NED-funded political interference undermining the political independence of a targeted nation is not only to politically capture the nation itself, but to cobble it together with other captured states within the region to form a unified front against Washington’s chief adversaries.

In Europe, this adversary is clearly Russia.

Damon Wilson, as executive vice president of the Atlantic Council before joining the NED as president and CEO, talked about eliminating what he called “grey zones of insecurity” between Nato and Russia. These “grey zones” are simply neutral nations that provide a buffer between Nato and Russia.

Wilson admitted in remarks made at the Atlantic Council in 2018:

“The strategy is not meant to create new dividing lines in Europe. The aim is to anchor a vulnerable insecure zone in the certainty of a stable and prosperous and free Europe. And over the long term, this vision includes a democratic Russia.

“But the pathway to reform in Moscow might just begin with choices that are made in Kiev, Chișinău, Yerevan and Tbilisi.”

This is an admission of intent. The overthrow and political capture of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia are meant to further encircle and isolate Russia, removing any buffer zone between Nato and Russia before eventually overthrowing and politically capturing Russia itself.

A ‘democratic Russia’ is a euphemism for a Russia subjugated under US-Nato-imposed ‘democracy’ controlled and administered by NED-funded organisations, media platforms, institutions and political parties.

The remarks Wilson made in 2018 have translated not only into US-Nato policy vis-a-vis Russia, but also into action within the NED in which Wilson now serves as president and CEO.

The NED in Asia: creating a united front against China
The NED’s ‘Asia’ webpage, now stripped clean of the financial disclosures that previously propped up an illusion of ‘transparency’, boasts of over 338 projects operating in 16 countries, receiving at least $51.7m in the fiscal year 2023 alone.

It openly admits to involving itself in the region’s elections, in the building of opposition parties, and even in promoting separatism.

The page refers to what is recognised under international law as Xinjiang, China as ‘East Turkistan’, a non-existent entity claimed by the ‘East Turkistan government in exile’, created and based in Washington DC.

US government support for separatism in China is a blatant violation of the UN charter, which under Article 2 states: “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.”

Not only does the US government harbour separatists in Washington DC, through the NED it also funds a number of organisations that openly seek separatism. This includes the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a US NED grantee, which openly states on its website that “the WUC declares a nonviolent and peaceful opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkistan”.

The WUC, funded by the US government through the NED, is openly conspiring to violate international law by seeking to separate Xinjiang from China. While the WUC claims it seeks to do this as a ‘peaceful opposition movement’, it is separatism nonetheless – a separatism dovetailing into violent terrorism carried out by militant Uyghur separatists like the ‘East Turkistan Islamic Movement’ (ETIM), which is currently based in Syria, having spent years fighting alongside UN-listed terrorist organisation Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, aka Jabhat al-Nusra), and is now openly vowing to target China, according to the Telegraph. (Uyghur fighters in Syria vow to come for China next by Sophia Yan, 13 December 2024)

The NED’s current ‘Asia’ webpage makes it abundantly clear that its efforts aren’t focused solely on the political capture of individual nations across Asia, but that it seeks to create a regional united front against China.

Under the euphemism of ‘promoting democratic unity’, the NED declares: “China’s rise as a regional and global power and its economic leverage have made it a powerful benefactor to and influencer of regimes in the region. Using its considerable financial power, China has signaled that respect for democracy and human rights is not a prerequisite or even a desirable feature for any potential partners.

“Recognising the need to protect and uphold democratic values, the rule of law and rules-based institutions, and to effectively push back against the growing illiberal trends in the region, Asian democracies are exploring how to cooperate and assume a greater responsibility in the defence and maintenance of internationally recognised norms and values.”

It also says: “To that end, the NED supports a variety of initiatives focused on bolstering democratic unity and cooperation among democratic nations in Asia as well as strengthening and expanding regional solidarity and cooperation among democratic actors. Specifically, the NED and the core institutes support partners in the region’s leading democracies to facilitate dialogue, build support, and promote greater leadership in defence of democratic norms and values.

“It supports regional networks of democracy and human rights activists and advocates that work to amplify democratic voices, facilitate exchanges, and strengthen regional solidarity around key democratic issues such as media freedom, free and fair elections, digital security and protection, and fundamental human rights.”

All of this is a long-winded way of admitting the NED seeks to create a regional anti-China movement eagerly parroting US State Department disinformation targeting China, poisoning the region’s population against China, all while expanding Washington’s influence and control over all regions in Asia along China’s periphery, just as it has done in Europe vis-a-vis Russia.

An example of how the NED does this was the October 2020 ‘Beyond Boundaries’ Facebook Live event targeting audiences in Thailand titled, ‘Situation of the Uyghurs in China and how we can help them’. The event featured former NED employee Louisa Greve, now ‘director of external affairs for the Uyghur Human Rights Project’, another NED grantee.

The moderators included Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a supposed ‘pro-democracy activist’ who has participated in and promoted NED-funded subversion aimed at Thailand itself.

The purpose of the Facebook Live event was to continue poisoning receptive Thais against China, despite the nation being Thailand’s largest trade partner, investor, source of tourism, and infrastructure partner, including the building of Thailand’s first high-speed rail line.

NED-funded opposition groups have also focused on outright blocking Thai-Chinese cooperation, including the ongoing Thai-Chinese high-speed rail project. The most overt example of this was when billionaire opposition leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit travelled to the United States to meet with representatives of the US State Department and NED-subsidiary Freedom House, as well as Arizona-based Hyperloop One, before returning to Thailand to condemn the Chinese-built high-speed rail project.

Thanathorn insisted that Thailand should instead invest in the now defunct ‘hyperloop technology’.

During one public presentation, Thanathorn insisted: “I think over the past five years we have been giving too much importance to China. We want to reduce that and rebalance our relationship with Europe, with Japan [and] with the USA more.”

Thanathorn led NED-backed protests in the streets of Thailand after losing the 2019 general election. In later years, his party performed better at the polls, owing to the NED’s corrosive effect across Thailand’s unprotected information space.

Today, both in Thailand and across the rest of southeast Asia, despite China offering an objectively better future, the USA still wields unwarranted influence because of the NED and the networks of subversive political opposition groups, media platforms and even political parties it controls, which is placing the region’s otherwise bright future in a precarious position much like Ukraine’s in the lead-up to 2014.

With the Philippines already fully captured and utilised by the USA to confront and pursue conflict with China, a rising Asia still faces the possibility of being plunged into regional war like both Europe and the middle east.

Defending against Washington’s superweapon
Russia and China have both devised able defenses against this US ‘superweapon’ of political capture.

Both nations either demand transparency from so-called ‘nongovernmental organisations’ (NGOs) funded from abroad, or simply ban them altogether.

Both nations have also secured their respective information space – restricting or banning US-based social media platforms that work with the US State Department to manipulate public opinion and even national identity in targeted nations, and have managed the flow of information with their own domestic social media platforms.

Both nations have robust domestic media industries that promote their own respective values, as well as international media platforms that communicate their side of the story to global audiences.

What both nations have so far failed to do, however, is extend this expertise to partner nations.

Both nations already sell a wide array of defensive systems to partner nations to defend traditional national security domains including airspace, land borders and shores. Neither has integrated the means of defending a nation’s information space into these exports. In fact, both nations have failed so far to communicate the critical need in the 21st century to defend a nation’s information space in the first place.

Russia and China could export turn-key social media networks that other nations could set up and oversee within their respective information spaces, displacing US-based networks and reasserting control over the flow of information within their own borders. This would allow nations and their people to decide what information can and cannot be shared, instead of deferring to Silicon Valley and their partners in the US State Department.

A similar package could be offered to help nations set up international media platforms like Russia’s RT or Sputnik and China’s CGTN, as well as domestic educational pipelines for producing local journalists, educators and future politicians and diplomats that reflect that nation’s best interests, not Washington’s and Wall Street’s interests as programmes like the US State Department’s Fulbright and Young Leadership initiatives do.

Russia and China, as key members of Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation), could lead efforts in standing up multipolar alternatives to US-based social media platforms that the rest of the world could share information on beyond the reach of US and European censorship and manipulation. Currently, Russian and Chinese social media platforms are optimised for domestic, not international use.

Finally, Brics could also lead initiatives in exposing and confronting US (and also European) interference by encouraging regional and national NGO transparency laws and creating forums that both expose this danger and support member states taking action to confront it through legislation. This includes providing protection against US threats, sanctions, and other coercive measures aimed at forcing targeted nations to submit to US political and information control.

All of these steps would aim at enhancing national sovereignty and upholding the self-determination of nations across the multipolar world, in line with the core principles of the UN charter. The US National Endowment for Democracy – even in name – poses as promoting ‘democracy’ worldwide. Yet, democracy is supposed to be a means for self-determination, while everything the NED funds is determined by and for Washington, not the nations that the NED’s funding is flooding into.

The NED represents Washington’s greatest ‘superweapon’. Its ability to enter into and capture a nation’s political, information and academic space circumvents even the greatest conventional armies standing in the way of US hegemony worldwide. It has participated in the destabilisation and destruction of nations and regions across the globe, causing damage greater than any missile Russia can design and deploy. The future of a truly multipolar world depends on defending against all of Washington and Wall Street’s weapons, especially its most far-reaching and effective.

At first glance, the NED and other US efforts to control political and information space around the globe don’t appear to be ‘weapons’ at all. Upon closer inspection, they represent the most devastating weapons of mass destruction employed this 21st century. They represent a serious threat to global peace, stability and prosperity. Serious efforts must be made to expose and defend against them.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 06, 2025 4:02 pm

Silent Propaganda on U.S. Imperialism Breeds Confused Americans
By Abel Tomlinson - February 5, 2025 1

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[Source: primevideo.com]

The basic fact that the United States is an empire is perhaps the most systematically taboo subject within mainstream American information systems and public discourse. U.S. imperialism is almost never discussed in depth, critically or intelligently, within corporate media or the educational system. It is never mentioned by candidates of the two dominant political parties, or brought up at presidential debates. It is rarely mentioned even within universities, outside of a few select courses or degree programs.

This deafening silence on this key subject is a form of unspoken propaganda. This ultimately manufactures an epidemic of deadly ignorance to arguably the most harmful institution in the world and sustains the mythology of a “benevolent U.S. government.” It also deprives Americans from core context that would enable correct comprehension of world events as they unfold. To debunk the mythology and expose American imperialism, it is crucial to first unravel its information-control methodology.

Within corporate-state media, there are various propaganda techniques; the most simple is outright lies like Iraq’s non-existent WMD and Saddam Hussein’s non-existent connections to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

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[Source: statesmanjournal.com]

More recently, we witnessed the incessant media mantra that the Ukraine war was “unprovoked,” despite a mountain of evidence proving the opposite. The U.S. massively provoked the war via NATO expansion and by sponsoring the ultra-nationalist 2014 Ukraine coup that caused civil war. We also recently experienced abundant direct lies to justify U.S.-backed Israeli genocide, such as the debunked reports of 40 beheaded babies and Hamas mass rape.

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[Source: lexe.edu.mx]

There is also propaganda by distortion, such as twisting the framing of events so as to make the provocateur or aggressor look like the victim or defender, when the inverse is the reality. For example, Israelis are typically framed as retaliating and “defending” against Palestinian attacks and rarely the reverse, which is an inversion of causation if one objectively examines the last 75 years of history. The Palestinians have suffered for decades under constant Israeli brutalization, occupation, land theft, blockade, apartheid, restriction of movement, carpet bombings and too many other crimes to list. This form of information warfare and manipulation of American minds on this subject began long ago. Noam Chomsky and other media analyst experts demonstrate this with crystal clarity in the superb 2004 documentary Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, free online here.

Another example of distortion is the constant corporate media framing of China and North Korea acting “provocatively” near their coastlines. In reality, it is the U.S. that is the provocateur as it practices massive annual war games and places dozens of military bases near their borders.

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Who is the aggressor? [Source: socialistaction.net]

This is in addition to oft-omitted historical context of former U.S. imperialism in China and genocidal extermination of 20% of the North Korean population. More than half a million tons of bombs were dropped on Koreans by the U.S., along with napalm and chemical weapons. Top U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay bragged that they “burned down every town in North Korea.” Corporate media never provide this context or allow this question: How would you feel if a previously genocidal military practiced annual war games on your borders?

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General Curtis LeMay [Source: pixels.com]

A third technique is propaganda by Hollywood mythmaking. The 2022 documentary titled Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood gives great insight into this method. The filmmakers obtained thousands of pages of declassified documents via Freedom of Information Act requests, and found intimate relationships between Hollywood filmmakers, the CIA and the Pentagon.

These documents exposed that “the Pentagon and CIA have exercised direct editorial control over more than 2,500 film and television productions, most of them since 2001.” The result is that past wars, the CIA and U.S. military are sanitized and glorified, creating a false image. The U.S. military and CIA are consistently portrayed as a benevolent force that is extremely divergent from the reality of imperialism.

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[Source: wsws.org]

Lastly, there is propaganda by omission, which functions two ways: by purposefully excluding key historical context or avoiding a subject altogether. An example of context omission is how preceding historical causation triggers for the Ukraine War are excluded from reports. Moreover, mainstream media consistently omit the crucial contextual fact that Russia has repeatedly sought peace agreements to stop the war, such as the Minsk and Istanbul agreements, which were sabotaged by the West. Secondarily, omission propaganda can function by simply never discussing a subject entirely, as is precisely the case with U.S. imperialism.

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[Source: x.com]

These propaganda methods powerfully manipulate American minds, and much of the rest of the world too as U.S. information control is global.

U.S. mythology is spread all over the planet not just indirectly via mainstream media and Hollywood, but also more directly via what The New York Times once called the CIA’s “Worldwide Propaganda Network.”

Aggressively invasive U.S. state media networks, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, et al. broadcast information all across the globe in 48 foreign languages.

Interestingly, some of these programs were covertly funded by the CIA until 1972. This state media works to ensure foreign subservience by painting a false image of the United States and manifactures opposition movements against defiant nations targeted for regime change.

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Cold War ad for Radio Free Europe, a CIA creation. [Source: estonianworld.com]

Due to the information void, most Americans have little to no clue that their own nation is certainly an empire. This causes the American public to be catastrophically uninformed about arguably the single most harmful institution on the planet, after decades of warfare and environmental harm are fully accounted. American ignorance to this core reality prohibits the population from fully understanding this transcendent, deeply bipartisan problem.

Consequently, this prevents them from contemplating solutions for opposing or dismantling the empire, or from intelligently adapting to its potential decline and preparing for its probable decline and potential collapse.

The cluelessness also inhibits Americans from fully understanding a vast amount of information reported in mainstream media, especially in terms of perpetual wars and imperial coups. For example, several nations have recently faced U.S. imperialist coups, such as Syria, Georgia and Romania, but mainstream reports do not convey this directly. This lack of contextualization makes Americans consistently vulnerable to the redundant deluge of propaganda, manufacturing of consent for imperial warfare. Without understanding what the coups and wars are really for, Americans remain gullible to the next round of lies, especially if the war party they prefer is the one whipping up the hysteria.

Even among the minority of Americans who acknowledge the empire, there is great misunderstanding. Most consequentially, there are numerous leading academics on this subject that fundamentally fail to fully grasp the deeper essence of American imperialism. This causes them to view the empire as positive or to improperly diagnose the full extent of the disease, which prevents them from presenting plausible cures or predictions. It also causes further misinterpretations of current events, as is standard among the broader public that knows nothing of empire.

Among the most lucid scholars of U.S. imperialism is Professor Michael Parenti. He points out in his book The Face of Imperialism that most historians have misleadingly painted a mythological, rosy picture of what imperialism really is. When writing about the Roman and British empires, they often give undeserved names of peace, such as Pax Romana and Pax Britannica. These terms disguise the brutal perpetual warfare and deep economic exploitation inherent to imperialism.

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[Source: en.prolewiki.org]

The same mythmaking also applies to academics writing on U.S. empire, such as military historian Max Boot composing this fiction: “U.S. imperialism has been the greatest force for good in the world during the past century.”

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Max Boot, empire apologist. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

Parenti finds that, even among academics who write critically of U.S. empire, many fail to fully describe imperialism. For example, when author Chalmers Johnson uses the word “empire,” it is “divested of its full meaning…[using it] to mean simply dominion and power, most notably military power.” (Emphasis added.) Like many other scholars, Johnson criticizes the military dimension of empire, but fails to fully criticize the economic dimension.

This is a misrepresentation of what U.S. empire has always been about. As Parenti states, “While we hear a lot about empire and militarism, we hear very little about imperialism…The very activity of empire.” (Emphasis added.) This comparatively shallow analysis devoid of “political-economic content” or critique of capitalist class interests is representative of the broader public discourse.

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Michael Parenti [Source: greenvillepost.com]

At its heart, imperialism has always centered on commerce, authoritarian economic extraction of natural and human resource wealth from far-off lands to enrich an elite investor class. It typically entails mass misery, exploitation, dehumanization, pollution, poverty and slaughter to whichever people live near valuable resources. This is known as the “resource curse,” which is the reason oil-rich nations, such as Iraq, Iran, Libya and Venezuela, have repeatedly been prime subjects for imperialist warfare, regime-change efforts and sanctions.

Another reason most Americans have difficulty fully recognizing U.S. imperialism is that it is not structured like previous colonial powers; hence, the more precise term neo-imperialism. For example, previous empires had explicit colonial territories they controlled using imperial vice-royalties, direct administrations that extracted vast resource wealth. Conversely, neo-imperialism does not overtly control the nations from which it expropriates wealth and does not have obvious viceroy administrators.

Instead, neo-imperialism functions using subservient vassal governments with puppet leaders, which can be either democratically elected leaders or dictators of various sorts. There is the superficial façade of independent sovereign nations, but underneath is the same imperialist extraction of wealth and exploitation of people.

One of the supreme insider accounts of U.S. neo-imperialism was provided by the highly decorated Marine Corps General Smedley Butler in 1933:

“I spent thirty-three years…[in] the Marine Corps…[as] a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys…I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street…I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested….I had…a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

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General Smedley Butler [Source: wnyc.org]

To make nations safe for capitalism as Butler describes, there are numerous mechanisms neo-imperialists use to establish and sustain vassal states, often called U.S. “allies.” Likewise, there are numerous methods they use to overthrow governments that resist their agenda. As William Blum wrote in his seminal work Killing Hope, “In virtually every case involving the Third World [that brought down the wrath of U.S. intervention], it has been…a policy of ‘self-determination’: [pursuing] a path of development independent of U.S. foreign policy objectives.”

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[Source: williamblum.org]

A nation becomes a target for regime change the moment it starts enacting independent economic-nationalist laws and policies that run counter to U.S. imperial interests. These policies often include nationalizing resources and kicking out U.S. corporations, and forming socialistic and anti-imperialist governments. It also includes even milder reforms like spending “too much” of a nation’s wealth on social policies and programs that help the broader public, the poorer supermajority.

The imperialist interventions include overthrowing many democratically elected leaders, such as Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala (1954), Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran (1953), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine (2014), and many others. These coups are supreme assaults against the institution of democracy itself, obliterating the lie that the U.S. government is in the business of spreading freedom and democracy.

A second body blow to that blatant lie is the fact that the U.S. sells weapons to 73 percent of the world’s dictators. The only “democracy” acceptable under U.S. corporate imperialism is one that is subservient to dictatorial Western capitalist interests.

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[Source: truthout.org]

Once neo-imperialists have marked a nation as a target for regime change, their methods can take many forms and with varying time schedules. We have witnessed dozens of successful regime changes and coup attempts, documented well in Killing Hope. There are four primary mechanisms neo-imperialists use to overthrow nations targeted for coups, which include economic warfare, information warfare, lawfare and military intervention.

The first regime change method is destabilzing economic warfare to manufacture popular discontent. Perhaps the most egregious example is the six decades long U.S. embargo on Cuba, which almost every nation on earth has repeatedly voted to end.

We also recently witnessed this method of warfare for Russian regime change, but the sanctions ended up backfiring and harming European economies more than Russia. Coercive U.S. sanctions can also ultimately cause mass suffering and death of a nation’s people as we saw in Iraq, Venezuela, Afghanistan and elsewhere, which is typically the intention to incite uprisings.

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[Source: orinocotribune.com]

Another coup methodology entails information warfare, election meddling, and funding subversive nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and US-funded “independent” media outlets. These organizations produce propaganda and organize Astroturf movements, in conjunction with economic warfare, to destabilize societies and incite public unrest for regime change, often called “color revolutions.”

This type of coup has been ongoing in Georgia for most of last year.

The US State Department, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are the principle agents that organize this type of imperialism activity. Notably, the largest private actor in these top-down “revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and many other nations is the billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros. Interestingly, this type of clandestine action was formerly done by the CIA before scandals erupted in the early 1980s.

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Ongoing color revolution in Georgia. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
The third type of regime change technique is lawfare, or overthrow via a nation’s courts and legal system. We recently witnessed this in the ouster of Imran Khan, the popular elected leader of Pakistan. A second example also occurred recently in Romania, when their top court cancelled the presidential election after it appeared independent candidate Călin Georgescu appeared to be winning.

Yes, Georgescu is a right wing politician with objectionable views, but that is not the stated or unstated reason his election was cancelled, nor does it justify cancelling Romanian democracy. The stated reason is questionable allegations of “Russian election interference” that smell similar to the now debunked Russiagate scandal in the 2016 US election.

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Imran Khan [Source: nation.com.pk]

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Călin Georgescu [Source: apnews.com]

The unstated likely reason was that Georgescu wanted to end Romania’s involvement in the US-led NATO proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. This posed a massive threat to U.S.-NATO war objectives because Romania shares a large border with Ukraine, and is strategically important for numerous reasons. Although direct U.S. pressure on Romania’s court has not been reported, it is highly likely given the stakes, and the U.S. has provided support for the court’s decision.

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NATO base in Romania at Deveselu. The U.S. believed it was imperiled with Georgescu’s impending election, so pushed to have the elections canceled. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Military intervention is the final method for regime change, once it is acknowledged that the other methods will not work. This coup technique includes overt direct invasions as we saw with Iraq and Libya to remove Saddam Hussein (2003) and Muammar Gaddafi (2011), respectively. Other forms of lower intensity military intervention include covert action and CIA-backed coups. This entails arming and training paramilitary groups, such as Latin American death squads trained at Fort Benning, Georgia.

It also includes the CIA arming and training Middle East religious extremist terrorist groups, such as the mujahedeen and Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. We also just witnessed a momentous US-backed coup in Syria led by Al-Qaeda-linked “rebels” that “love Israel,” led by “former” Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Additionally, covert action coups can entail the CIA working with foreign military leaders to overthrow their own governments, as we saw with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

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[Source: geopoliticaleconomy.com]

Typically, after neo-imperialist coups in the Third World succeed, various sorts of dictators are installed or sham elections are held to install a “democratically” elected puppet. Shortly thereafter, various neo-liberal economic reforms are established, resources and markets are “liberated” or opened up to foreign corporate exploitation, including by a weakening of labor or environmental laws. State assets are privatized and sold off at undervalued prices, including public utilities and infrastructure. Austerity measures are instituted to slash or eliminate social programs for the poorer working class, such as pensions, health care, education, etc.

These “reforms” also come in packages called “structural adjustments,” and as stipulations for large loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Once a nation takes out these loans, they are not only required to institute the reforms, but enter into financial subjugation. These structural adjustments ensure most of the nation’s wealth and profits go to wealthy foreign capitalist investors, instead of being kept in the nation to help the nation’s people.

The many millions of impoverished people in the Third World would not be poor if they were able to fully benefit from their nation’s riches, as Michael Parenti points out in this speech:

“The Third World is not poor! [Ruling-class capitalists] don’t go to poor countries to make money. There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines is rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! Only the people are poor, but there’s billions to be made there, to be carved out and taken…For 400 years the capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken [these nations’ natural resources and cheap labor…These countries are not underdeveloped; they’re over-exploited.”

These are some of the key ways that U.S. imperialism functions. This is a small taste of what is hidden from American minds, and much of the rest of the world too as U.S. information control and propaganda is global. This subject is perhaps the biggest elephant in the room, the highest voltage third rail of political discourse. Neither major party will touch it in a serious way. It is also the institution that causes the most mass death and misery to millions of people all around the planet.

The cost of empire also ultimately harms Americans at home as domestic social programs are cut to pay for vast imperialism budgets. For example, the U.S. could have become a world leader in high-speed rail like China if it had not prioritized wasting more than $8 trillion on its recent “War on Terror.” The vast military empire is also the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuel petroleum on the planet, among other massive environmental harms.

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[Source: geopoliticaleconomy.com]

The anti-democratic nature of imperialism abroad also breeds anti-democratic domestic policy. When Democrats and Republicans work with the CIA and State Department to meddle in foreign elections, manipulate foreign populations with propaganda and wage endless coups, that became their institutional culture.

This helps to explain why they wage information warfare on and censor us domestically, and why undemocratic rule by the richest oligarchs remains firmly entrenched. A “democratic imperialist” or “republican imperialist” are blatant oxymorons, considering imperialism is inherently anti-democratic and anti-republican. Genuine democracy is impossible without an end to U.S. imperialist oligarchy.

All but the most privileged and sheltered Americans surely understand that something is very wrong with American culture, economy, media and politics. The immense obstacle of U.S. imperialism is at the very epicenter of our national and international political and economic disease, and omission propaganda obscures the diagnosis.

Once a critical mass of Americans learns to see through the propaganda and begins showing others the way, we will have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution. Only when enough people wake up and reject imperialism will the world be able to know genuine democracy, justice and peace.

Incinerating US Neo-imperialist Propaganda
This very article is an effort toward burning the carefully constructed web of lies that upholds the disease of U.S. Empire. However, it appears something far more powerful toward this end is on the horizon. For all the horrors promised by incoming president Donald Trump, there may be a couple silver linings.

With mind-boggling myopic hubris, Trump seems to be setting ablaze the core architecture of US imperialism propaganda. The imperial establishment of both corporate war parties and their media partners worked tirelessly for decades to create the fictional narrative and false image of what USA is and does. According to their fairy tales, “USA is the good guys spreading freedom and democracy all over the globe,” and that is what U.S. foreign policy is all about. They invested vast human and financial resources toward manufacturing and repeating a constant deluge of lies that hide the reality of U.S. neo-imperialism, obscuring its record of coups, war crimes, genocide and mass murder.

In one fell swoop, Trump appears to be incinerating their many years of hard work. Obviously, he is not doing this because he is anti-imperialist. By making it a centerpiece of his agenda to take over Canada, Greenland, and Panama Canal, Trump is shifting the US image back to classical imperialism.

By threatening to annex NATO member Canada and take Greenland from EU/NATO member Denmark, Trump is pushing for what neo-imperialists claimed Russia was wanting do: to take European/NATO territory. This is certainly corrosive to NATO unity, and European subservience to U.S. Empire. If the U.S. loses European allies and NATO falls apart, there will be virtually nobody left. If Europe awakens to how they were scammed over the backfiring US economic war on Russia and costly U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, it will further spell the end of NATO and American Empire.

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[Source: theweek.com]

Whether Trump succeeds in seizing Canada and Greenland or not, he may be inadvertently causing severe damage to the empire. He is endangering the key propaganda mythology of USA as the “good guys,” and is pushing away the most important allies that give political legitimacy to U.S. neo-imperialist policies. He is exposing American Empire for everyone to more easily see. The emperor was already barely clothed, and now he is removing the last shred of clothing, the thong if you will.

Once a critical mass of humans learns to see clearly through the propaganda, we will have the ability to end this extremely harmful institution. When enough people wake up and reject US imperialism, the world will have greater potential to know genuine democracy, justice and peace. This anti-imperialist awakening began long ago, and this train has recently been gaining steam. More and more of us are throwing fuel on the fire. Please join us.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... americans/

It takes more than just 'waking up', getting worked up about what you see on the internet. There must be leadership and as yet I don't see it.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 07, 2025 3:14 pm

Jerusalem Post Targets MintPress After Exposé on Israeli Spies in US Media
February 7, 2025

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By Alan MacLeod – Jan 30, 2025

In December, The Jerusalem Post published an investigation from Nicholas Potter, a “counter-extremism expert,” who falsely accused MintPress News of being part of a network of far-left, foreign government-funded outlets that push conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic extremism. The claims are untrue and are particularly ironic, considering the calls for the extermination and expulsion of Palestinians and Arab peoples the newspaper has published and because Potter is a German national whose job at the Post is directly funded by the German government.

“Flimsy” Research
The Jerusalem Post article attacked a series of MintPress investigations published late last year exploring the deep connections between U.S. media, the pro-Israel lobby, and the Israeli intelligence services. In this series, MintPress revealed that hundreds of former Israel lobbyists now work in top jobs in American corporate media, including for MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and The New York Times. We also showed how former employees of an Israeli spying agency, Unit 8200, are trusted to write America’s news, including about Israel/Palestine – an enormous conflict of interest.

The virality of the two investigations, which were widely cited and read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world, seems to have upset many of Israel’s most ardent backers, including individuals at the Jerusalem Post, who warned about our influence.

“In both cases,” the Post wrote, “the evidence was flimsy at best,” adding:

In the former, a brief internship at AIPAC during college was all it took to be a part of an ominous conspiracy to control the media. In the latter, a previous stint as a reservist in Unit 8200 of the IDF’s Intelligence Corps was more than sufficient to brand a journalistic security analysis as a clandestine psychological operation.”

This is a disingenuous description of the information presented. Firstly, the evidence provided was far from flimsy. We noted dozens of high-profile instances of the hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists we found working in American media. The nearly 6000-word article went into almost tedious detail, cataloging example after example, and, for brevity’s sake, had to be cut back from a much larger article.

Nevertheless, the Post suggests that the best evidence of Israel lobby/U.S. media overlap is a “brief internship” at AIPAC. This is deeply misleading. In fact, that is one of the least substantial cases of the phenomenon we noted. The dozens of examples included the executive producer of MSNBC, who was an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence commander; a CNBC lead reporter who was previously an officer in the IDF’s public relations department before working for the Friends of the IDF in the U.S.; and a Fox News producer who was Benjamin Netanyahu’s aide at Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.

Potter seemed to take particular umbrage at our use of the word “spy” to describe Unit 8200 agents. This is surprising, given that most of the world’s top journalistic outlets regularly describe the organization as a spy agency, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, CNBC, The Financial Times, The Guardian, and the Times of London. It is also commonly referred to as such in Israeli media, including the Jerusalem Post itself, which recently described Unit 8200’s function as “spying on the West Bank.” Thus, it is entirely reasonable to describe someone such as Axios political reporter Barak Ravid, who was, until at least 2023, a Unit 8200 analyst, as an “Israeli spy.”

Unfortunately, instead of critically engaging with the evidence MintPress provided, Potter’s article accuses us of peddling a “cocktail of disinformation, conspiracy theories and antisemitic narratives,” including suggesting we claimed that there is a gigantic Israeli “clandestine psychological operation” in the same vein as the “Jews control the media” conspiracy.

At no point did we claim this. In fact, the articles explicitly argued against this tired trope, noting:

This investigation does not accuse any of those noted above [of being part of a conspiracy] or claim they are unworthy of holding those positions and should be fired. But it does highlight the extent to which pro-Israel sentiment is considered so normal in elite circles, so much so that former Israel lobbyists, spies, and soldiers can be charged with producing supposedly objective and unbiased reporting, even on Middle Eastern issues.

A second key piece of evidence the article points to as supposed proof of MintPress’ inherent antisemitism is cartoons from Carlos Latuff showing the Star of David printed on bombs being dropped on Gaza. The argument appears to be that the Star refers to the Jewish religion as a whole rather than a very obvious stand-in for the State of Israel. In fact, MintPress explicitly uses only the Israeli flag in cartoons, and not just the Star of David, precisely because we wish to distinguish between the religion of Judaism and the settler colonial project of Israel.

This would be patently clear to any reader viewing these cartoons, perhaps why Potter’s article does not link to or feature any of them. Otherwise, cartoons very obviously satirizing Israeli policy – from an outlet employing many Israeli and Jewish staff/contributors – would be extremely difficult to transmogrify into racist attacks on Judaism.

Another serious (and false) allegation made is that MintPress News is funded by foreign governments, be they Russia, Iran, Syria, or whomever the current target of the U.S. attack is today. Throughout the article, the author implies that MintPress’ “murky” funding sources trace back to the government of Bashar al-Assad. And yet, the Post also concedes that MintPress has been highly critical of the Assad government in recent reporting. Thus, we were apparently Assadists until the very moment he was gone (and it was, therefore, ineffective to use as a slur against us). In reality, all our fundraising and membership drives are public, which the article concedes. Yet, it still attempts to insinuate otherwise.

Using the vagaries of the English language, the article strongly implies that we are agents of a foreign power without directly saying so—something that could be legally actionable. Therefore, after the Syrian government’s fall, it concludes, “MintPress News may be left with one backer fewer.”

This allegation is entirely untrue. But as an anti-war, anti-imperialist outlet, MintPress is regularly labeled as a mouthpiece of Russia, Iran, Syria, Hamas, China, Venezuela, Cuba, and whatever other country is currently drawing the ire of the U.S.

It is ironic, however, that, to give their flimsy allegations about state-sponsored disinformation a veneer of credibility, the Jerusalem Post turned to two “experts” at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab for comment. The Atlantic Council is NATO’s think tank, primarily funded by the military and its component governments. The council – whose board of directors features no fewer than seven former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency – has been responsible for much of the most egregious hysteria and fake news about foreign interference in Western media and society. For instance, it published a series of reports claiming that virtually every European party challenging the centrist establishment is secretly controlled by Vladimir Putin. From Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and UKIP in the U.K. to Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece and PODEMOS and Vox in Spain, are all, in their words, the “Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.”

The current head of the Digital Forensics Lab is Graham Brookie, who, in 2017, left his job at the White House, working as the National Security Council’s Advisor for Strategic Communication to join the Atlantic Council.

Potter also took aim at other radical outlets supposedly spreading “disinformation and antisemitic narratives,” including The Grayzone, who, he noted, in a scandalized tone, had reported that many of the deaths on October 7, 2023, came at the hands of the Israeli military. Surprisingly, he would bring this up, as it is now widely acknowledged as a fact, including in Israeli media, that this was indeed the case.

Potter also goes after German platform Red, whom, he notes, “regularly reports from left-wing, anti-Israel demonstrations in Germany, even interviewing Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg” (emphasis added), as if this was home run evidence of the platform’s inherent antisemitism.

Who Cannot Be Trusted?
Together, the article concludes, “MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Red are examples of far-left websites that can’t be trusted when it comes to the Middle East.” This is quite the accusation, as the Jerusalem Post has promoted much of the most outlandish fake news out of the region.

In October 2023, it “confirmed” the infamous 40 beheaded babies hoax, claiming that their staff had personally seen the evidence of decapitated infants. This evidence-free assertion was designed to spark outrage and manufacture public support for a genocide, which, as we shall see, the Post also cheerled.

A few weeks later, it published an article claiming that viral images of a Palestinian baby killed by the Israeli onslaught were actually fake and that the “child” was nothing more than a toy doll. After worldwide condemnation, the Post was forced to retract the story.

These sorts of accounts help to spread the myth that casualties of the Israeli onslaught are exaggerated or fake. Indeed, in February, the Post came out and explicitly said that there was a “fake humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” “Hamas is attempting to ride this humanitarian wave by creating the false narrative that Gazans are starving and dying as a result” of Israeli actions, it told its readers, adding that the Palestinian resistance group was able to “send the United Nations to do its bidding.”

Who is the Real Extremist?
Potter styles himself as an expert in counter-extremism. And yet, in the middle of a genocide, he chose to move to Israel and work for a publication that has published many of the most open calls for the extermination of groups of people in recorded history.

“Israel is at war with the Palestinians, not just Hamas,” reads the headline of one Post article that argues that collective punishment of all Palestinians for Hamas’ actions is necessary and hints that the country should engage in an all-war of annihilation against an entire people.

Another article, entitled “Why moving to the Sinai Peninsula is the solution for Gaza’s Palestinians,” argues that Israel should drive the entirety of the Gazan population into the Egyptian desert – a textbook example of genocide. Using distinctly Hitlerian language, the article states that this is the perfect “solution” for the Palestinians, who have produced nothing of value except an “intrinsic, hatred-focused, fanatic, anti-Israel Islamic culture.”

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Editor-in-chief Zvika Klein interviews Israeli activist and head of United Hatzalah, Eli Beerat, at the Jerusalem Post conference in New York, June 3, 2024. Lev Radin | AP

In November 2023, a Jerusalem Post article entitled “Exposed; Hamas’ Propaganda Team” created a hit list of prominent pro-Palestine journalists and influencers trapped in Gaza, claiming that they were secretly Hamas militants and that they were hiding at the Al-Shifa Hospital, a site that Israel famously later turned into rubble.

The article’s purpose was twofold: first, to set up a pre-justification for Israel’s continued campaign of targeting journalists, and second, to provide some sort of excuse for the destruction of the hospital. As of the time of writing, every hospital in Gaza has been attacked, and fewer than half are at all operational. Meanwhile, Israel has killed well over 200 journalists since October 7, 2023.

The Post has also led the calls for Israel to conquer as much territory as possible. “Southern Lebanon is actually northern Israel,” ran the headline of one article not-so-subtly demanding that Israel take much of Lebanon permanently. Another piece, published only last week, demands that Israel should annex southern Syria, including the strategic summit of Mount Hermon. Both articles suggest that the State of Israel is biblically obligated to conquer its neighbors.

The Post’s editors are clearly in lock-step with the Netanyahu administration on the issue. Indeed, earlier this month, they printed a sycophantic paean to him entitled “Chosen to lead: Netanyahu will be remembered as one of the greatest leaders of all time.” The article presented the prime minister as a frugal, saint-like figure, attacked from all sides by people who want to “bring him down because he is too good, too charming, too powerful, and does the right thing.” Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his involvement in war crimes.

This extremist position clearly goes right to the top of the outlet. In 2023, the Jerusalem Post’s then-editor-in-chief, Avi Mayer, wrote an article entitled “No Longer Part of Us,” where he said that “pro-Hamas Jews” – i.e., Jews who do not support Israel’s genocide – were “wicked” “un-Jews” spreading “bile” and must be shunned and ex-communicated.



State-Backed Disinformation
Potter, however, despite being a counter-extremism expert, appears unable to see any pro-Israel extremism. One of the things that seems to most alarm or anger him about MintPress and other independent media is our supposed connections to foreign governments. This is bizarre, as Potter himself is quite literally – and openly – in the pay of the German government. Nicholas Potter is a British-born German national who decided, in the midst of a genocide, to move to Jerusalem and work for an outlet championing the extermination and forced displacement of Palestinians, along with the annexation of Lebanon and Syria.

He did so thanks to his position as the Ernst Cramer and Teddy Kollek Fellow of the International Journalist Program, a post funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. The head of this fellowship is Dr. Frank-Dieter Freiling, the senior vice president of the German state broadcaster, ZDF. As Red has detailed, Potter has a long history of working for groups and outlets sponsored by Berlin.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post is no less connected to state power than Potter. Avi Mayer, its editor-in-chief until recently, was formerly the project coordinator for the office of the President of Israel and was acting head of the IDF’s spokesperson unit for North America. To this day, he is still a reservist in the IDF unit.

Mayer’s successor, Zivka Klein, is a former IDF Spokesperson’s Unit commander. After leaving the military, he worked for the World Zionist Organization and later became a government official in the office of the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin.

MintPress News receives no funding and has no connections to any government. And yet, leading the smears against us is a German government-funded journalist writing in a newspaper headed by senior Israeli government and military officials. In every accusation, they say, lies a confession.

Can Journalists be Terrorists?
Why, then, has a German with seemingly no connections to Israel decided to move there to defend the country and throw baseless accusations at supporters of Palestinian liberation?

Potter is influenced by the Antideutsche tendency, a rather complicated current among the German left wing, who see opposition to German nationalism and atonement for Germany’s past crimes as among their priorities. This has led them to zealously support the State of Israel and see any criticism of the country in Germany as a potential Nazi dog whistle.

As a consequence, the movement has even targeted German Jews protesting Israeli crimes – a rather bizarre outcome for an anti-fascist tendency. In previous years, this somewhat warped ideology has also seen them support George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and his plan to transform the Middle East.

The German state has offered its full support to Israel and has gone so far as to ban Palestine protests and lock up countless activists, including Jewish people. The phrase “From the River to the Sea” has effectively been criminalized, with Berlin announcing that it would deny citizenship to any that used it. New German citizenship laws require all applicants to sign what is, in effect, a loyalty oath to the State of Israel, declaring that it has a “right to exist.”

In addition to his German government-funded role at the Jerusalem Post, Potter is the editor of the German publication Die Tageszeitung. Last week, he wrote and published an article defending Israel’s slaughter of reporters in Gaza titled, “Can Journalists be Terrorists?”

Potter argued that “the distinction [between journalist and terrorist] is sometimes difficult,” noting that many Palestinian journalists “lead double lives” as Hamas or PIJ fighters, and even listing at least one publication that he implies is fair game for the IDF to target. The effect of the article is to cast doubt upon the claim that Israel has indeed killed so many media workers. Given this context, perhaps MintPress News and the other outlets Potter labeled got off lightly, only being marked as state-sponsored disinformation peddlers.

Jerusalem Post claims to have seen "verified photos" that prove the fake beheaded babies story, now adds that they were burned too.

This outlet's editor-in-chief is settler Avi Mayer, who is currently an Israeli military reserve and previously worked in the military's… https://t.co/d6ekonQb5N pic.twitter.com/GmIPWRxVde

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) October 12, 2023



A foreign government-sponsored journalist writing in an extremist, genocide-supporting publication has claimed that a small, independent anti-war outlet opposing the slaughter is part of an expansive disinformation network.

All the charges against MintPress News – that we are state-sponsored, that we peddle disinformation and antisemitic conspiracies – are entirely false. And yet they are predictable; being smeared by big outlets as foreign agents is, unfortunately, par for the course for independent media. Those who opposed the Iraq invasion were presented as secretly in league with Saddam Hussein. Those who questioned NATO’s bombing of Libya were in the pay of Muammar Gaddafi. Today, those who oppose Western imperialism around the world are reflexively described as agents of Cuba, Venezuela, Assadists, Putin’s Puppets, or part of a network controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

By highlighting the crimes of Washington and its allies – and corporate media’s complicity in them, alternative media threatens both the power of the state and the establishment press. That is why it is relentlessly suppressed, defamed and marginalized. Unfortunately, there appears to be no lack of journalists with more ambition than morals willing to climb the career ladder by smearing activists and anti-war voices.

The silver lining is that when attacks come, it is a sure sign that we have provoked the ire of the empire and those who support it. The MintPress investigations that drew the Jerusalem Post’s ire went viral and were read by vast numbers of people. Throughout the article, Potter warned about our reach and influence. Clearly, then, to deserve such a disingenuous attack, we are doing something right.

(MintPress News)

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 08, 2025 3:21 pm

Counting the Victims of Israel’s War on Gaza Is Low on Media’s Priority List
Luca GoldMansour
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As Gazans return under a ceasefire, the official death toll has risen beyond 60,000, including almost 18,000 children (Middle East Monitor, 2/2/25).
The official death count of Israel’s genocide is climbing as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians resolutely march back to the north of Gaza. That’s in part because those returning to their demolished homes have been unearthing the remains of their missing loved ones whose deaths went unconfirmed for months.

Discoveries like these were anticipated by a study published in the prestigious British health journal Lancet (1/9/25) earlier this year. It estimated that the Gaza Health Ministry may have undercounted the deaths caused directly by the Israeli assault by 40%, placing the real toll closer to 65,000. This is before taking into account the indirect causes of death resulting from the onslaught, like disease, malnutrition and lack of clean water or adequate healthcare.

The study’s findings came as no surprise to experts, who for months have warned that Israel’s attacks on first responders, journalists and infrastructure, as well as its refusal to let in international human rights monitors and media organizations, were causing an undercount. But if all you read are major Western media outlets like the New York Times or CNN, their reports on the study (New York Times, 1/14/25; CNN, 1/9/25) may well have surprised you.

That’s because, over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

No more pressing task
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The phrase “Hamas-run” (CBS, 9/21/24) was used to insinuate that death numbers might be exaggerated, when experts knew the official toll was certainly an undercount.
It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted:

If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000.

‘Debate over credibility’
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When the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs sought more identifying information about the list of Palestinians killed by Israel, the New York Times (5/15/24) leapt on this to insist that it “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war.”
Western outlets haven’t just failed to consistently convey the full extent of the carnage in Gaza to their readers, they’ve actively downplayed it.

Take the Times story (5/15/24) headlined “How Many of Gaza’s Dead Are Women and Children? For 10,000, the Data Is Incomplete.” The article used the United Nation’s exclusion of some 10,000 confirmed casualties from the tally of women and children killed in Gaza, due to incomplete information, as an opportunity to launder Israeli claims discrediting the health ministry.

The UN’s acknowledgement that some data is incomplete has “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war,” the article says. But who’s on either side of this “debate,” according to the Times? Affirming the tally’s credibility, we have Biden, the civilian casualty monitoring group Airwars and researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, according to the Times. On the other side, only Israel and the infamous neoconservative Elliott Abrams are credited.

The article acknowledged that the number of women and children dead can be used as an “indication of how many civilians have been killed, a question that lies at the heart of the criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war.” But nowhere in the piece was it mentioned that the UN secretary general has called Gaza a “graveyard for children,” or that just the month before, doctors in Gaza reported “a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest” (Guardian, 4/2/24), suggesting a practice of Israeli snipers targeting noncombatants.

In another article (1/22/24), headlined “The Decline in Deaths in Gaza,” the Times noted that “the daily death toll in Gaza has fallen in half over the past month, reflecting a change in war strategy.” Set aside that the article neglected to actually mention how many Palestinians had been killed by then. Instead, consider all the other factors that went unmentioned in the report: Had Israel’s devastating rampage up until then created new challenges to reporting fatalities? Was Israel’s strategy shifting focus to imposing a devastating blockade on humanitarian aid, eventually causing more starvation-related deaths? The answers are yes and yes.

‘Arguing for caution’
Image
Credulously accepting Israeli and US claims that they were not responsible for the destruction of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (10/26/23) demanded of media outlets that quoted the Gaza Health Ministry: “Was there any regret repeating claims from the terrorist group?”
CNN similarly exemplifies Western media’s inclination to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry and downplay the death toll in Gaza. In February 2024, the Guardian (2/4/24) published the testimony of six CNN employees confirming that the network’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is shaped by its management’s biased edicts that include restrictions on “quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives,” while “Israeli government statements are taken at face value.”

As FAIR (11/3/23) previously covered, after an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of Palestinians, CNN (10/26/23) published an op-ed from its media reporter Oliver Darcy chastising Western outlets, including his own, for relying on health ministry claims about the strike. Instead, he demanded they retract their reporting, because Israel and the US had investigated the strike—a crime in which they were both implicated—and found no wrongdoing.

When CNN has published stories about the human consequences of Israel’s war, such as its coverage (8/16/24) of the health ministry’s toll surpassing 40,000, it has only made passing mention of the impact beyond the immediate death toll, referring to “the daily suffering, malnutrition and volatility in Gaza.” While in that report CNN apparently found no reason to bring up the Lancet letter published just one month earlier, it found plenty of space to uncritically state that “Israeli military officials have said they try to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza, and that Hamas bears the blame for using civilians as ‘human shields.’”

When Western outlets do publish the rare reports that convey a broader impact than just the health ministry tally, they still leave much to be desired. Take the Times’ coverage (7/11/24) of the Lancet letter projecting some 186,000 Palestinians killed by Israel. It started off by introducing the concept of excess deaths—which, almost a year into the genocide, may be the first time Times readers have been exposed to the concept—and explained that it “can provide a truer indication of the toll and scale of conflicts and other social upheaval.”

But right after mentioning the Lancet’s estimate, the Times said that it “immediately generated debate, with other researchers arguing for caution in any such projection.” What reason for caution did the Times provide? That any estimate would necessarily be tricky, because it would have to start with the health ministry’s data—which they acknowledged is imperfect, given the health system in Gaza’s almost total collapse. So instead of stressing a need for investigating the true cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, given the difficulty Palestinians are having reporting the toll, the Times found itself parroting urges against such inquiries, for the very same reason.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been the first genocide live-streamed for the world to see. Journalists have more tools at their disposal than ever before to glean what information they can. Western media’s failure to do so will be recorded in history.

https://fair.org/home/counting-the-vict ... rity-list/

******

Who Else Wants Access To Apple Users' Encrypted Data?

There is, for whatever reason, little online echo so far to this new Washington Post story:

U.K. orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts (archived)
Secret order requires blanket access to protected cloud backups around the world, which if implemented would undermine Apple’s privacy pledge to its users.

Security officials in the United Kingdom have demanded that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies.

The sole story author, Joseph Menn, is stationed in San Francisco and 'specializing on hacking, privacy and surveillance.' The 'people familiar with the matter' who talk through Menn are likely from the same wider area, i.e. from Apple in Cupertino.

The British demand is of course outrageous and will not be followed. But I wonder why the Brits would even try to go this way.

We know thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations that the British signal intelligence agency GCHQ is a mere offshoot of the U.S. National Security Agency. It may thus be that the real people trying to get access to Apple users' encrypted archives are sitting on the west coast of the Atlantic.

Or is it request coming from other structures?

The office of the Home Secretary has served Apple with a document called a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies when needed to collect evidence, the people said.
The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.


Apple had been warned that such an order was coming and did protest to no avail.

Neither the Biden nor the Trump administration seem to support Apple:

Senior national security officials in the Biden administration had been tracking the matter since the United Kingdom first told the company it might demand access and Apple said it would refuse. It could not be determined whether they raised objections to Britain. Trump White House and intelligence officials declined to comment.
One of the people briefed on the situation, a consultant advising the United States on encryption matters, said Apple would be barred from warning its users that its most advanced encryption no longer provided full security. The person deemed it shocking that the U.K. government was demanding Apple’s help to spy on non-British users without their governments’ knowledge. A former White House security adviser confirmed the existence of the British order.


Since the early days of the Internet government agencies all over the world have demanded open access to all data transferred by it. End-to-end encryption, as deployed by Apple, makes that impossible.

Backdoors, as the one the British demand, are a inherently dangerous. The 2024 hack of U.S. communication systems, allegedly by Chinese actors, had used a backdoor the U.S. and other governments had demanded:

This isn't the first time that CALEA-mandated wiretapping backdoors have been exploited by hackers. As computer security expert Nicholas Weaver pointed out for Lawfare in 2015, "any phone switch sold in the US must include the ability to efficiently tap a large number of calls. And since the US represents such a major market, this means virtually every phone switch sold worldwide contains 'lawful intercept' functionality."
Two decades ago, that mandatory wiretapping capability was subverted by hackers targeting Vodafone Greece. They intercepted phone conversations of the country's prime minister and high political, law enforcement, and military officials, among others.

Which is to say that nobody appears to have learned anything between the 2004 hacking of government-mandated wiretapping capabilities at a Greek telecom and the 2024 hacking of government-mandated wiretapping capabilities at U.S. internet service providers. Well, unless we're counting the Chinese hackers. They seem to have learned quite a bit from the earlier experience.


If there is a backdoor to any system it WILL be abused. Not only by the government that demands its installation but also by others.

Since the 'Chinese' hack has become known U.S. officials have urged everyone to use end-to-end encryption:

In a joint December press briefing on the case with FBI leaders, a Department of Homeland Security official urged Americans not to rely on standard phone service for privacy and to use encrypted services when possible.
Also that month, the FBI, National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency joined in recommending dozens of steps to counter the Chinese hacking spree, including “Ensure that traffic is end-to-end encrypted to the maximum extent possible.”

Officials in Canada, New Zealand and Australia endorsed the recommendations. Those in the United Kingdom did not.


The best way to prevent snooping access requests is to liberate the data of those people who demand it. Some Apple engineer might want to thing about that.

Posted by b on February 7, 2025 at 16:32 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/w ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 09, 2025 3:17 pm

A Look at the USAID Limited Hangout: Sharpening, Not Dismantling US Regime Change Abroad
Posted by Internationalist 360° on February 8, 2025



The USAID Limited Hangout Continues…

USAID’s “exposure” remains focused mainly on partisan squabbling and wedge issues.

There is still no mention of the many millions spent during the previous Trump administration itself on regime change including via USAID but also the CIA and NED in Venezuela or propaganda targeting China.

It’s being made to look like only “Democrats” were involved when it was bipartisan.

Worse still, the Trump administration has laid out a foreign policy that will necessitate continued foreign interference and global propaganda campaigns conducted under previous administrations including both Biden’s and Trump’s previous term in office.

The goal is to conduct damage control vs. growing awareness of and effective defenses against US propaganda and interference, salvage, sharpen, and streamline future ops.pic.twitter.com/OKbdcvO7RG

— Brian Berletic (@BrianJBerletic) February 7, 2025


https://libya360.wordpress.com/2025/02/ ... ge-abroad/

*****

Mainstream Media Boost 'Independent' Media Which Depend On U.S. Assistance

What is the meaning of 'independent' in English language?

Cambridge Dictionary:

independent adjective (NOT INFLUENCED)
not influenced or controlled in any way by other people, events, or things
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Ed.) and others:

independent /ĭn″dĭ-pĕn′dənt/ adjective
Not governed by a foreign power; self-governing.
Free from the influence, guidance, or control of another or others; self-reliant.
"an independent mind."
Not determined or influenced by someone or something else; not contingent.
"a decision independent of the outcome of the study."
Affiliated with or loyal to no one political party or organization.
Not dependent on or affiliated with a larger or controlling entity.
"an independent food store; an independent film."
Not relying on others for support, care, or funds; self-supporting.
Providing or being sufficient income to enable one to live without working.
"a person of independent means."


Following the recent revelations that many outlets and journalist are financed directly or indirectly by U.S. government organization like USAID or NED the mainstream media have set out to redefine the meaning of 'independent'.

'Independent' now seem to be anyone how gets his paycheck from the U.S. while producing reports or rumors designed to fit U.S. policy narratives.

Consider these recent reports:

USAID and the Media in a ‘Time of Monsters’ - Columbia Journalism Review, Feb 4 2025
What the aid funding freeze means for independent journalism around the world.
Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency (archived) - New York Times, Feb 5 2025
Strongmen celebrate as Trump aid freeze hits media - Financial Times, Feb 6 2025
Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze (archived) - Washington Post, Feb 7 2025


From the first one:

[A]ccording to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”

From the NYT report:

Agency grants to promote democracy, human rights and good governance have gone to support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like Mr. Putin detest.

From the Post:

The suspension of USAID has had a dramatic effect on both Ukrainian and Russian independent news outlets that relied on the grants to operate and produced work often critical of their governments.
...
Ukraine’s independent media, a collection of small regional outlets, muckraking investigative websites and internet news platforms, have been reeling since the announcement, with some organizations saying that they are just weeks away from slashing staff or closing down entirely.
“We risk losing the achievements of three decades of work and increasing threats to Ukraine’s statehood, democratic values, and pro-Western orientation,” Detector Media, a journalism watchdog, said in a statement on its website last week.


The last paragraph seems to be an admission that 'Ukraine’s statehood, democratic values, and pro-Western orientation', which - when you scratch their surfaces are all quite dubious - are the result of U.S. paid propaganda.

One also wonders how the WaPo writers can write of independent media when even a few paragraphs in the Ukrainian Detector Media (also U.S. financed) admits that these are depending on foreign payments:

Detector Media’s head Nataliia Lygachova told The Post that she thought “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign grants were dependent on American assistance.

A more correct headline for the WaPo piece is thus:

"U.S. state-funded media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze"

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCPR) has been behind several large stories like the Panama Papers which revealed the dirty offshore businesses of a large number of people the U.S. dislikes. In a (highly recommendable) video reportage about the project its founder and publisher, Drew Sullivan, admits on camera that the 'independent' organization was launched and is financed by U.S. government entities.

The money, more than 50% of OCCPR's budget, comes with strings attached. All major management positions within OCCPR have to be confirmed by the U.S. financing agency. OCCRP reporting about crimes the U.S. is involved in is discouraged if not prohibited. You might want to guess where the selected hacked and leaked material OCCPR reports of is coming from ...

Over the last week we have learned that many 'independent' international outlets are primarily funded by U.S. government entities - directly or through U.S. funded Non-Governmental Organization. Some estimate that 90% of the media in Ukraine is depending on U.S. taxpayer money.

All this came out due to the Trump's administration's freeze of USAID money. But there are many more U.S. government entities, the National Endowment for Democracy, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, who each have likewise funds to spend on 'independent' foreign media and influence organizations.

It is high time to dismantle networks like these:

WikiLeaks @wikileaks - 3:47 UTC · Feb 8, 2025
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.

...

Posted by b on February 8, 2025 at 16:58 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/m ... .html#more

The insidious beauty of the USAID setup is that it does deliver much needed aid to some people and it does regime change and other dirt too. So as we currently see there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about various needs going unmet due to the shutdown and no doubt at least some of that is legit. I suspect the org will survive, stripped of much of it's legitimate humanitarian missions to "shit countries" while probably accelerating it's duties as 'CIA lite'.

Ya wonder why NED was not also put under the hammer...wait, I don't wonder at all.

*****

USAID Spent Millions On Regime Change and Woke Agendas, Funded Censorship & Smears of Americans
February 8, 2025



USAID Funded Censorship, Smears of Americans (Excerpt)

By Lee Fang, Substack, 2/4/25

…The sprawling agency [USAID] has financed groups that have engaged in smear campaigns and efforts to silence prominent American dissident voices…

But most troubling, the foreign assistance agency has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are agents of the Kremlin.

American government entities face restrictions on spreading such propaganda against domestic targets. The foreign nexus of USAID provides a convenient loophole. American grants and contracts flow, often through third-party intermediaries, to a network of foreign recipients, which can push to silence American journalists and politicians through outside advocacy.

In Ukraine, USAID, through its contractor Internews, supports a network of social media-focused news outlets, including New Voice of Ukraine, VoxUkraine, Detector Media, and the Institute of Mass Information. These news outlets have produced a series of videos and reports targeting economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and Professor John Mearsheimer as figures within a controlled “network of Russian propaganda.”

The influence of these outlets extends far beyond the borders of Ukraine. VoxUkraine, for instance, is an official fact-checking partner to Meta and helps the social media giant censor so-called disinformation. Detector Media similarly produces English-language disinformation reports widely circulated through western media.

Despite branding as independent outlets, these organizations are heavily reliant on USAID…

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/02/usa ... americans/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 10, 2025 3:59 pm

Media Fail to Inform About Disastrous Economic Effects of Mass Deportations
Conor Smyth
Image
A non-hypothetical headline from the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics (9/26/24).
“GDP Could Take Massive Hit as a Result of Mass Deportations.” “Mass Deportations Could Leave Many Americans Without Jobs.” “Mass Deportations Could Spur Spike in Inflation.” “Mass Deportations Could Cost Nearly $1 Trillion.”

These are hypothetical headlines of the sort you run if you want to drive home the point that mass deportations would not only be a humanitarian outrage, but an economic disaster. Which, according to economists, they very much would be.

As of 2022, undocumented immigrants constituted approximately 5% of the US workforce. Deporting all or a large number of them would substantially reduce the supply of labor in the US economy and would concurrently reduce aggregate demand by eliminating the spending of anyone deported. GDP could, as a result, drop as much as 7.4% below a baseline forecast by the end of 2028, per the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Rather than opening up more job opportunities for American workers, past research tells us that the opposite will occur. As Michael Clemens from Peterson puts it:

The disappearance of migrant workers…dries up local demand at grocery stories, leasing offices, and other nontraded services. The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.

The supply shock induced by mass deportations of undocumented workers would have the additional effect of spiking inflation, perhaps several points above baseline. In short, beyond being a humanitarian nightmare, mass deportations would be an economic self-own of epic proportions.

Rather than sound unfamiliar or strange, as it may to readers of corporate media, this sort of expert analysis of the economic effects of deportation could become conventional wisdom if outlets ran headlines like those above. After all, those are the type of headlines you run if you are dedicated to objectivity in reporting, to informing your audience of what the research says, no matter whether it might offend their sensibilities.

‘Warning of a fiscal crisis’
Image
Writing about the prospect of mass deportation in New York City, the Washington Post (1/28/25) highlighted Mayor Eric Adams’ “warning of a fiscal crisis.”
They are not, of course, the headlines you run if your paper is committed to bending over backwards to avoid offending Trump and his supporters. So at the Washington Post, such headlines are hard to come by. In fact, if you look through the “Immigration,” “Economy” and “Economic Policy” sections on the Post’s website, you will find a grand total of zero articles since the start of the year with headlines directly addressing the negative economic impact of Trump’s proposed mass deportation policy.

Some articles published over this period have addressed the economic effects of mass deportations, but only in a marginal way. For instance, in an article (1/31/25) published at the end of January about an ICE raid at a workplace in Newark, New Jersey, the Post included the following quote from Newark mayor Ras Baraka:

“How do you determine…who is undocumented and who is criminal?… In this community, you might pull everybody over, because this is a city full of immigrants,” Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey, said in an interview. “You got everybody on edge around here. And it’s going to hurt the economy.”

What would the economic damage look like? The Post declined to elaborate.

Similarly, a piece (1/28/25) from a few days earlier about an ICE raid in New York City had little to say about the impacts of mass deportations on the economy. It did, however, take some space to highlight negative economic effects of illegal immigration on the city, explaining that “the largest influx [of migrants] since the Ellis Island era…left New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) warning of a fiscal crisis.” The only economic figure cited in the piece was the figure for the cost of the migrant influx, apparently over $5 billion since 2023.

Cautiously ‘wonky’
Image
“So much recent political rhetoric has succeeded in portraying undocumented people as driven to crime rather than contribution,” the New York Times‘ Ginia Bellafante (1/31/25) noted.
Contrast this coverage with that of the Post’s competitor, the New York Times. At the end of January, the Times published a piece (1/31/25) headlined “What Mass Deportations Would Do to New York City’s Economy.” A far cry from the hypothetical headlines provided at the top of this article, the headline nonetheless signaled an intention to seriously analyze the economic effects of mass deportations. The first economic figure cited in the piece, coming in the third paragraph, highlighted the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants:

As a group, undocumented immigrants paid $3.1 billion in New York state and local taxes in 2022, for example, a sum equal to the city’s early education budget for the current fiscal year.

Not wanting to come off as too activist for citing data on the positive contributions of undocumented immigrants to New York City’s tax base, the Times felt obliged to clarify that this figure did not come

from a left-leaning human rights group intent on fostering sympathy for people who crossed the border illegally, but rather from the wonky Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

An odd way of presenting data, but a way that evidently feels comfortable for a paper that has no intention of seriously rocking the boat, even if it is willing, on this occasion, to stand up from its seat rather than clinging to the captain’s feet for dear life.

Despite some apparent hesitancy, the piece went on to examine the loss in local and state tax revenue that could result from deportations of even a fraction of the undocumented population, and to explain the centrality of undocumented workers to key industries in the city, from food services to childcare to construction. None—I repeat, none—of this information could be gleaned from the Post’s coverage of the immigration situation in New York City.

‘Recast the US economy’
Image
A Washington Post subhead (11/6/25) said that Trump’s deportation plans might “recast the US economy”—which turns out to mean shrinking it by as much as 6%.
In a major piece on Trump’s approach to the immigration system published just before Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post (1/19/25) likewise failed at its basic task of informing its readers. The Post at least mentioned that mass deportations could hurt the economy—“By rounding up immigrants who fill otherwise vacant jobs, [Trump] could hurt the US economy he has pledged to supercharge”—but that’s where the analysis ended. No reference was made to research showing that mass deportations could lead to complete stagnation of GDP during Trump’s time in office, or that it could lead to a several percentage point spike in inflation.

Prior to the start of the year, the Post had published more about the economic effects of mass deportations. For instance, an article (12/27/24) from the end of December headlined “The 2025 Economy: Five Things to Watch” included “Deportations” as the second thing to watch. It nonetheless featured only a small discussion of the topic—four short paragraphs—and no hard numbers were cited regarding the effects on employment, GDP and inflation, despite these numbers existing in reputable research from a nonpartisan think tank.

A Post piece (11/6/25) from a day after the election, meanwhile, had discussed how mass deportations could “recast the US economy and labor force”—what a verb! Towards the end of the article, the reporters touched on the effects of mass deportations on inflation and GDP, citing concrete numbers for the second variable:

Many economists also say that mass deportations on the scale proposed by Trump would trigger inflation in the short term—by forcing employers dealing with labor shortfalls to raise prices. A major deportation program would also shrink the economy by 2.6% to 6.2% a year, according to a recent review of projections published by the University of New Hampshire.

This paragraph, however, was all that was given for a concrete discussion of the economic impact of mass deportations.

Amazingly, before the election, the Post editorial board (10/24/24) did take the time to weave in commentary on Trump’s mass deportation policy in yet another editorial fearmongering about Social Security. The board wrote:

Whatever you think about its merits as immigration policy, a crackdown on undocumented workers, including mass deportations, could also hurt Social Security’s finances because undocumented workers contribute payroll taxes without collecting benefits for decades—if ever.

No other economic effects of mass deportations were mentioned by the editorial board. A substantial hit to GDP, though relevant to the discussion of public finances, was not discussed. Concerns about the effects of mass deportations were merely looped into apparently more pressing concerns about the sustainability of Social Security, which the Post wants to cut (FAIR.org, 6/15/23).

‘Not about wages’
Image
NPR (1/17/25) looked at the economic problems posed by mass deportation through the eyes of employers who depend on exploiting immigrant labor.
The Post has been particularly egregious in ignoring the topic of the economic impact of mass deportations, but it certainly hasn’t been alone in covering it poorly. NPR, for example, decided to let employer propaganda slide unchecked in a recent piece (1/17/25) about the contributions of immigrants to Nebraska’s economy.

The piece started by centering the experience, not of immigrants, but of the executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association, Al Juhnke, whose main concern appears to be maximizing the availability of cheap labor for the agricultural industry in Nebraska. An early paragraph read:

Juhnke says attracting workers to Nebraska is not about wages. The average pay for a meat trimmer is close to $18 an hour—well above the state minimum of $13.50. “These are good paying jobs in the plants,” he says. “People say, ‘Well, just double or triple the pay [and] you’ll get United States citizens to work.’ No, you won’t.”

There is no follow up on this point; it is simply accepted as fact by NPR. But there’s little reason to trust an executive of an organization advocating for pork producers on this.

Responsible coverage might at the very least entail bringing in an independent researcher to comment on this claim. For instance, it could be noted that, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage in the county of Nebraska where much of the meat processing occurs is $18.64 per hour for a single adult with no children. For a family with one working adult and one child, it’s $32.27. Such information immediately undermines the executive’s claim that a wage of “close to $18 an hour” is a good wage, and in turn should raise eyebrows at the idea that raising the wage would have no effect on the attractiveness of employment to US citizens.

Survey results from the Manufacturing Institute and Colonial Life, furthermore, indicate that manufacturing companies have seen success in recent years in attracting workers by increasing pay and benefits. Why should we assume meat processing plants face different dynamics from other manufacturing plants?

More to the point, for an article focused on undocumented immigrants’ plight, it would be worth following up this claim, and the surrounding text discussing Nebraskan employers’ search for cheap immigrant labor, with an analysis of the exploitation of immigrant labor.

A follow-up question to the executive might be: Can employers afford to pay workers, immigrant or not, substantially more? And if so, why are they not doing that?

All that the piece gives, however, is a quote from a civil rights advocate lamenting the dehumanization of immigrants: “It’s dehumanizing—‘Let’s harness immigrant labor.’ Like an animal.” This is a powerful quote, but it’s not a substitute for basic factchecking of an empirical claim.

‘Real economic crisis’
Image
Even while pointing out the inflation threat posed by mass deportation, Politico (1/20/25) allowed the Trump team to promote dubious numbers from an anti-immigrant hate group.
Though also better than the Post, in that it has actually prominently covered the negative economic effects of mass deportations in the “Economy” section of its website recently, Politico has similarly engaged in sloppy reporting, failing to provide skepticism where it is needed. In an article headlined “Americans Hate High Prices. Mass Deportations Could Spark New Surges,” Politico (1/20/25) did highlight how much of a disaster Trump’s deportation policy could be for the economy. But it quickly turned the issue into a both-sides debate and, crucially, left unchecked a particularly wild claim:

Some Trump allies say the doomsaying over the incoming president’s pledges to deport as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants is overblown. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement that the “real economic crisis is the $182 billion American tax dollars spent each year to cover the costs of 20 million illegal immigrants that have flooded our communities and replaced American workers.”

This claim—that undocumented immigrants impose a $182 billion cost on American taxpayers—was not discussed further. Politico just let it sit. It appears the figure comes from an organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a far-right advocacy group, which was claiming 15 years ago that undocumented immigrants cost American taxpayers over $100 billion per year.

A later estimate from 2013 by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that’s behind Project 2025, put the figure closer to $50 billion. But even that number is controversial—it includes, for example, the cost of government-provided educational services received by the children of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are US citizens. Educational services, in fact, constitute the majority of the costs associated with undocumented immigrant households in the Heritage analysis.

The amount spent on direct transfer payments to such households is only a small fraction of the estimated overall cost. Other categories of cost include spending on police, fire and public safety, as well as transportation services and administrative support.

The liberties that conservative researchers take in deciding what to count as a cost imposed by undocumented immigrants on US taxpayers make one question the utility of this accounting exercise in the first place. As one researcher has commented:

Fundamentally I think it’s the wrong question…. You’re talking about people who work for very low wages and are excluded from nearly all social services. It takes a real act of will to say they’re exploiting us.

Yet for Politico, none of this context is worth bringing into the piece. Even a basic attempt at factchecking the claim from a Trump ally is absent.

Support declines with details
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When respondents were asked about worker shortages, support for mass deportation went from net 7 points positive to 5 points negative (ABC, 1/29/25).
If this sort of coverage—ignoring the issue at the Post, shying away from hard-hitting coverage at the Times, and allowing the story to be warped at NPR and Politico—is going to be the norm for coverage of the economic impact of Trump’s extremist immigration policies, there is little hope for an informed US public on this issue.

Currently, the public appears broadly supportive of mass deportations—that is, if you ask them directly and provide no further details. However, once more details are given, support for mass deportations declines.

One poll from about a month ago gauged support for the following policy: “Detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.” It found 52% of Americans in favor and 45% opposed. But with the addendum “even if it means businesses will face worker shortages,” the result changed to 46% in favor, 51% opposed. The effect of including other information about the negative economic effects of mass deportations was not tested, but it seems highly probable that other information—like the potential for a hit to GDP or a spike in inflation—would similarly turn Americans against mass deportation policy.

The problem is, the details about the potentially disastrous economic effects of mass deportations are likely known by only a small minority of the population. If corporate media outlets took their job seriously, they would make those details very well known. That could have major political effects, and could help turn the tides against extremist immigration policies.

Failing to inform the public likewise has major political effects. Passivity means greater leeway for Trump and his backers to shape public opinion, with their claims perhaps continuing to go unchallenged by outlets like Politico. Elon Musk, for one, is known as a prolific propagator of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, and has frequently used X to amplify his message in the past. If corporate media fail to confront such misinformation, they effectively acquiesce to its corruption of the popular consciousness.

Ultimately, it’s up to corporate media to make a decision about what journalism means to them. They can’t escape making a decision with significant political consequences—political consequences are coming no matter what. But they can decide whether they care more about not appearing political to Trump supporters, or about protecting millions of people—and the health of the US economy.

https://fair.org/home/media-fail-to-inf ... ortations/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 15, 2025 4:16 pm

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NYT advises Trump to kill more Venezuelans
By Lucas Koerner, Ricardo Vaz (Posted Feb 15, 2025)

Originally published: FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) on February 12, 2025 (more by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting)) |

Donald Trump is back in the White House, and faux opposition is once again the order of the day for the Western media and the Democratic Party. Whether it comes to criminalizing migrants (FAIR.org, 1/25/25), maintaining U.S. “soft power” via USAID, downplaying anti-democratic power grabs (FAIR.org, 2/4/25) or whitewashing Nazi salutes (FAIR.org, 1/23/25), the centrist establishment seems quite content to normalize Trump or even outflank him from the right.

There is, of course, no area of greater consensus than U.S. imperial grand strategy, from waging genocidal war in Palestine (FAIR.org, 1/30/25) to recolonizing Washington’s “backyard” south of the Rio Grande. Accumulation by laying waste to the societies of the global South via carpet bombing and/or economic siege warfare is, according to anti-imperialist political economist Ali Kadri, the name of the game.
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Bret Stephens (New York Times,1/14/25): “Ending Maduro’s long reign of terror is a good way to start [the Trump] administration—and send a signal to tyrants elsewhere that American patience with disorder and danger eventually runs out.”
Venezuela is no exception to this multi-pronged onslaught. And the U.S. empire’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, proudly leads the charge, most recently advocating the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “through coercive diplomacy if possible or force if necessary.”
High on his own (imperial) supply
In a column belligerently titled “Depose Maduro,” New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/14/25) made an overt case for U.S. military intervention to topple Venezuela’s government. He hailed this textbook crime of aggression as “overdue, morally right and in our national security interest.”

For the Times’ self-described “warmongering neocon,” that last point is characteristically paramount. Specifically, he asserted that U.S. “national security” requires “putting an end to a criminal regime that is a source of drugs, mass migration and Iranian influence in the Americas.”

The irony that during the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency actually facilitated the trafficking of cocaine to working-class Black communities in the context of the Iran/Contra scandal (FAIR.org, 12/29/24) was evidently lost on the Times columnist.

Then as today, the principal drug routes to the United States cut across the Pacific rather than the Gulf of Mexico (FAIR.org, 9/24/19). A 2017 DEA report found that less than 10% of U.S.-bound cocaine flowed through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean corridor, with WOLA reaching a similar conclusion in a 2020 study.

Not only does the bulk of drug trafficking flow through U.S.-allied countries, but the U.S. government itself is broadly complicit in the perpetuation of the multi-billion dollar contraband, as evidenced in its support for narco puppet regimes in Afghanistan (New York Times, 7/27/08) and Honduras (FAIR.org, 3/20/24; Covert Action, 3/14/24).

In marked contrast, the U.S. has levied “narco-terrorism” charges against top Caracas officials, going as far as to place a bounty on Maduro’s head, without providing a shred of evidence, since Western outlets are happy to take U.S. officials’ word, no questions asked (BBC, 1/10/25; New York Times, 1/10/25; Washington Post, 1/10/25; AP, 1/10/25).

Stephens lamented that Washington’s murderous economic sanctions “didn’t work” and that its bounty “also won’t work.” The columnist conveniently ignored that the unilateral coercive measures, described aptly by U.S. officials as “maximum pressure,” were quite effective in deliberately gutting Venezuela’s economy, in the process killing at least tens of thousands, and spurring the migrant exodus he pointed to as justification for his proposed military adventure.

Such omission regarding U.S. responsibility for Venezuelan migration is by now a staple of corporate media coverage (New York Times, 1/31/25; PBS, 1/31/25; CBS, 2/2/25). Indeed, support for Washington’s economic terrorism against Venezuela has been fairly uniform across the U.S. political spectrum for years (FAIR.org, 6/4/20, 6/4/21, 5/2/22, 6/13/22).

Common tactics include describing sanctions as merely affecting Maduro and allies (New York Times, 1/6/25; NPR, 1/10/25; Al Jazeera, 1/6/25; Financial Times, 1/31/25) or portraying their consequences as merely the demonized leader’s opinion (New York Times, 1/31/25; BBC, 1/10/25; Reuters, 1/27/25).

The Iranian bogeyman
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Stephens cites a story (Infobae, 1/10/25) about an Iranian “drone development base” in Venezuela that offers as its only source for the claim that “there is information” about such a base.
It is no surprise, either, that in Stephens’ casus belli, Iran appears alongside the familiar conservative tropes of Latin American migrant hordes and narcotics threatening the U.S. (white settler) body politic.

Stephens’ Orientalist fixation with the Iranian bogeyman is notable, if hardly novel. Western media have in recent years circulated baseless rumors of Iran covertly shipping military equipment to Venezuela (FAIR.org, 6/10/20), and the Times in particular has promoted equally evidence-free claims of drug trafficking by Iranian ally Hezbollah (FAIR.org, 5/24/19, 2/4/21).

In the latest whopper, Stephens cited Iran having “reportedly established a ‘drone development base’” at a Venezuelan air base. However, this story comes from rabidly anti-Venezuelan government outlet Infobae (1/10/25), which did not even bother describing its anonymous source. The report only vaguely stated that “there is information” about this purported base.

Regardless of whether there is any truth to the alleged defense cooperation between the two sovereign nations, the perceived threat is, following the late Edward Said, symptomatic of Western imperialism’s enduring obsession with the “loss of Iran” in the wake of the 1979 overthrow of the Shah. Like the Chinese Revolution before it, Iran’s Islamic Revolution is still decades later portrayed as a global civilizational menace.

But the effort to update the “axis of evil” with a revised cast of rogue states from Venezuela to Iran also crucially serves to manufacture consent for military aggression against Tehran, which has long been the ultimate dream of significant segments of the U.S. political class and intelligentsia, including Stephens (FAIR.org, 10/25/24).

On elections and ‘tropical despotisms’
In Stephens’ tropical gunboat diplomacy redux, there was something for everyone, even bleeding-heart “liberals” horrified that Venezuelan President Maduro supposedly “stole the election, terrorizes his opponents and brutalizes his people.”

As always, U.S. imperialist intervention ideologically hinges on denying the Bolivarian government’s democratic credentials, most recently regarding the outcome of the July 28, 2024, presidential vote (Venezuelanalysis, 8/22/24, 7/29/24). However, Washington’s blockade ensured that the elections would never be free and fair. As the main factor driving economic hardship and migration, U.S. sanctions meant Venezuelans headed to the polls with a gun to their heads, not unlike Nicaraguans in 1990.

It is the height of hypocrisy for U.S. officials and their corporate media stenographers to claim the right to arbitrate other sovereign nations’ democratic legitimacy, even as they advance fascism at home and genocidal war across the globe. That sectors of the Western “compatible left” echo Stephens and his ilk, caricaturing the Maduro government as a “corrupt” and “repressive” regime, is unfortunate but not surprising (Ebb, 10/3/24).
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Extra! (1—2/90): “In covering the invasion of Panama, many TV journalists abandoned even the pretense of operating in a neutral, independent mode.”
The core racial assumption, going back to the 19th century, is that Global South states that refuse to bow to Western imperialist diktat constitute “tropical despotisms” to be toppled in a never-ending “civilizing mission,” with its anti-Communist, “war on terror” and neo-Orientalist mutations.

Demolishing the Death Star

It is noteworthy that the script for Stephens’ Rambo sequel is over 35 years old: Stephens argued for “U.S. military intervention of the sort that in 1990 swiftly ended the regime of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.” Formerly U.S.-backed narco dictator Noriega was, not incidentally, an ex-CIA agent involved in Iran/Contra (Extra!, 1—2/90; FAIR.org, 12/29/24).

The New York Times warmonger-in-chief’s rendering of the intervention is fantastically selective, forgetting that the Central American nation was already “pre-invaded” by U.S. military bases, and that the savage bombing of the Afro-Panamanian neighborhood of El Chorrillo transformed it into “Little Hiroshima.”

But the sober reality is that Venezuela is not Panama. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Armed Forces, alongside other corps, like the Bolivarian Militia, have spent a quarter of a century preparing for a “prolonged people’s war of resistance” against the U.S. empire at the level of doctrine, organization, equipment and training.

If the U.S. and its Zionist colonial outpost failed to defeat the heroic Palestinian resistance in Gaza after nearly 500 days of genocidal war, an asymmetric conflict with a significantly larger and stronger force, across a territory more than 2,000 times as large, is not likely a serious proposition.

Nonetheless, it is the duty of all those residing in the imperialist core to grind Washington’s industrial-scale death machine to a definitive halt. This paramount strategic objective demands systematically deposing the New York Times’ Goebbelsian propaganda.

https://mronline.org/2025/02/15/nyt-adv ... nezuelans/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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