Censorship, fake news, perception management

Questions, Comments, Concerns etc about The Bell
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 13, 2021 2:20 pm

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Trump's Twitter ban reveals who really runs the US
CGTN | Updated: 2021-01-12 13:56

Editor's note: Keith Lamb is a University of Oxford graduate with an MSc degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies. His primary research interests are China's international relations and "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

After the recent chaos on Capitol Hill the outgoing President Donald Trump has been permanently banned from his social media platform of choice, Twitter. This came after Twitter said that it has seen "plans for future armed protests" on its platform.

Ironically, Trump being distrustful of the traditional mass media monopolized by a small elite, has throughout his presidency used Twitter to speak directly to his people. By doing so he was able to circumvent the power of the media he distrusts which he believes is at the service of US-based transnational capital (who Trump calls the globalists).

Indeed, the growth of the internet and its accompanying social media have been traditionally viewed as avenues to circumvent powerful vested interests. However, Trump's ban from Twitter highlights that social media is not a neutral space but one where vested monopolist interests also prevail even against a billionaire president.

In fact, the traditional mass media and new forms of social media work hand in glove. Take Juan Guaido's attempted coup in 2019 against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro where he, surrounded by armed men in uniforms, claimed to be at La Carlota Military Airfield in eastern Caracas.

Speaking on social media, while simultaneously being broadcast by CNN, Guaido, claiming to be surrounded by thousands of supporters, said that "today, the armed forces are clearly with the people … The time is now."

In fact, Guaido's assertion that he was surrounded by thousands of supporters was false and neither was he at La Carloto Military Airfield. Instead, he stood outside the airfield on a highway overpass. CNN, being there, knew this too which is why they only filmed close-ups. The truth is that this was a proactive attempt to stimulate a popular uprising and it was one actively supported by President Trump.

No doubt, at times social media can be used by the underdog to circumvent traditional state power and vested interests. However, this conception is largely a self-promulgated one that arises from the mass media itself.

In fact, the trumpeting of social media as being a neutral force of freedom and free speech if swallowed whole can be dangerous.

This is because firstly this belief is false. Media ownership has the final say on who to ban; the collection of data is centralized in the hands of the corporation rather than the users.

Secondly, this belief reinforces an inaccurate perception which equates that the interests of the media corporations who own social media are one and the same as their users. In fact, a corporation's primary interests lie with preserving its own class interests as well as striving for increased profit over social progress for all.

For example, the June 2009 Iran protests is an example where social media, in league with the traditional mass media, propagandized Western users of Twitter into believing that Twitter is a tool that allowed Iranian protesters to organize and fight for liberal freedoms.

While these 2009 protests were widely dubbed by Western media as the "Twitter Revolution" it is highly doubtful that Twitter played any significant role. This is because firstly there were only around 8,600 Twitter accounts in Iran at that time. Secondly, the assumption that the mass of Iranians were calling out for Western-style liberal freedoms is highly dubious.

The "Twitter Revolution" was merely wishful thinking. It took place predominantly in the imagination of Western Twitter users rather than Iran itself.

Statistics by the Pew Research Center showed that the prominent tweet about the 2009 Iran protests was the circulating of a CNN story about how Iranian activists were using Twitter. In addition, one of the top tweets was the sharing of a webpage that encouraged users to change the color of their avatar to green which was the symbol of the protest movement.

In the modern age, cyberwarfare is commonly used by both state and non-state actors. For example, under Obama's orders the US used the Stuxnet software to disrupt the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Iran. The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army hacked the Associated Press' Twitter account on April 23, 2013 tweeting: "Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is Injured." Within three minutes of this tweet, the New York Stock exchange lost $136 billion in equity.

Along with outright hacking, there are other prevalent tools for disrupting social media. Commonly automated accounts known as bots are used to game algorithms to push content into feeds. This can drown out reasoned real debate between humans and populate networks with soundbites. This in turn can give the illusion that a certain view is popular and lead to the formation of a false consensus. With the bandwagon effect, people jump on to support a view for fear of not running with the crowd.

In the document "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations" revealed by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, it was uncovered that the US and the U.K. take a very active role in using social media for their covert operations against certain targets. Tactics include writing false blogs purporting to be a victim of a target, emailing family members, leaking information, ruining business relations and posting negative information on forums.

According to the Strategic Culture Foundation, the above-mentioned tactics have been used across the world to foment uprising. Coincidentally, these uprisings are always at the service of opening up markets and space for transnational capital. Evidently, even the head of the world's most powerful state is subservient to this force too.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202101/1 ... a20b9.html
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 25, 2021 12:52 pm

For some, politicizing WHO research trip takes precedence over saving lives: China Daily editorial
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2021-01-24 20:25


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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) speaks during the 148th session of the Executive Board on the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Geneva, Switzerland, Jan 21, 2021.[Photo/Agencies]

As a key part of the country's pandemic control measures, it is compulsory for anyone entering China from overseas to undergo quarantine. There are no exceptions. Even the members of the World Health Organization team that have arrived in Wuhan to conduct research in the city where the novel coronavirus cases were first identified must undergo the stipulated quarantine.

The experts participating in the research trip will have been informed of this in advance and must have agreed to it.

Nonetheless, some Western media, who are still trying to lay the blame for the pandemic at China's door, and realizing the research might deny them further opportunity, have jumped on the WHO team's quarantine as "proof" that China is "impeding" its research.

The only thing there is proof of is the anti-China bias of Western media such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Despite the change of administration in the United States, they are once again trying to smear China.

Even though the WHO scientists have spoken highly of China's quick and effective response when the spread of a new virus was identified in Wuhan; even though Chinese scientists were the first to map the genetic sequence of the virus and share it with the world; even though China has been the largest contributor of essential medical supplies to the rest of the world; and even though how and where the virus jumped to humans has still to be determined, these media organizations are still promoting the previous administration's nasty claim that China is to be held responsible for the pandemic.

Along with the medical workers and community workers fighting on the front line against the virus, the scientists at the forefront of the nation's efforts to understand the previously unknown virus receive their due respect in China and their guidance is heeded.

But these Western media are trying their best to convince people that in China politics prevail over science, facts and lives.

It is a charge better leveled at their own governments, which have ignored the scientific advice in pursuit of their own short-term interests.

On the contrary, China has left no stone unturned in its efforts to protect people's lives once the nature of the threat was realized.

Notably, the attempts by the two US media organizations to resurrect the former US president's infamous "China Virus" conspiracy came when Biden said on Friday that "We're 400,000 dead, expected to reach well over 600,000".

The WHO has made it crystal clear that the research in Wuhan has a scientific purpose. It is aimed at trying to gain more knowledge about the virus and its transmission so as to avoid a similar pandemic in the future. Despite this, these media outlets obviously feel no qualms about distorting its mission.

The US president's call for unity should apply to the international community and its fight against this common enemy, as it is a case of all for one and one for all. However, that essential solidarity will not be forthcoming until the Western media put facts and common sense above ignorance and prejudice.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20210 ... a4af3.html

Bolding added.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 01, 2021 1:53 pm

UN Independent Expert Alfred de Zayas: ‘This is How the Human Rights Industry Works’
Italian journalist Geraldina Colotti asks de Zayas about corporate media manipulation of Venezuela’s human rights situation.

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Alfred de Zayas is a UN independent expert and former rapporteur for human rights. (Archives)

By Geraldina Colotti – Red Angostura
Jan 26th 2021 at 2.12pm

The following is an extract from an interview conducted by Italian journalist Geraldina Colotti with former UN Rapporteur for Human Rights and international law expert Alfred de Zayas.

Geraldina Colotti (GC) - There is much talk of human rights in this third millennium, but there seem to be no obstacles to their violations, starting with the denial of basic rights such as food, health, housing and free education. What is your conception of human rights and what can be done to ensure that the international institutions designated to defend them actually fulfil their role? Is this possible today, considering the current international situation?

Alfred de Zayas (AdZ) - Indeed, a "human rights industry" exists, and many officials of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner [for Human Rights], diplomats, activists from non-governmental organisations, human rights teachers, and, of course, also many "independent experts" and rapporteurs are more or less opportunistic.

These people consider themselves "better" than others, but do not necessarily feel solidarity with the victims of human rights violations. Some of my bosses were models of integrity and professionalism, such as Professor Theo van Boven, Professor Kurt Herndl, Judge Jakob Muller, or High Commissioners Bertrand Ramcharan and Navi Pillay, but many others are simply there for good pay, prestige and other benefits.

My philosophy on human rights is as follows: all human rights derive from human dignity, which is inherent in all women and all men. They require a recognition of the equality of all of God’s children, of the whole human family, and require respect for a dignified life, which means having access to the basics of food, water, medicine, housing, employment, etc. The right to life necessarily means the right to a cum dignitate life [dignified life] – and respect for others through the sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas [use your own property in such a manner as not to injure that of another] principle. We also need personal freedom, the right to truth, to information, to freedom of opinion, the right to make mistakes and to start over.

Recently, a report of yours on human rights in Venezuela caused a sensation. In it, you highlighted the responsibility of the so-called “sanctions” imposed by the United States and its allied countries, coercive and unilateral measures that the UN considers crimes against humanity. How did you get to that report and what consequences did it have on your work?

Twelve of my fellow rapporteurs had previously requested to be invited to visit Venezuela on an official mission without success. That intrigued me. In addition, Venezuela has always interested me, since it is a country close to Cuba [where de Zayas was born before his family migrated to the US] with a similar culture and music.

Of course, I had read a lot about the so-called “humanitarian crisis,” and I wanted to investigate. Much to my surprise, my request was approved [in 2017] by Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza. Of course, I was indoctrinated like everyone else, since before my trip to Venezuela I had read the information available – the studies of the Office of the High Commissioner (in 2017 the office was held by Mr. Zeid Raad el Hussein), of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) (1).

My visit opened my eyes, and I realized that the media narrative does not correspond to reality. I spoke to a dozen ministers, but also with the opposition, with the Chamber of Commerce (Fedecámaras), with the Churches, with the Jesuit Priest Numa Molina, with about 40 non-governmental organisations, Amnesty, HRW, Provea, Fundalatin, the Sures Group, the National Network of Human Rights, with teachers and students. My two meetings with [Economics] Professor Pasqualina Curcio of the University of Caracas were also important. Her four books on the crisis impressed me, especially The Visible Hand of the Market.

My main concern was to listen to all parties –audiatur et altera pars [listen to the other side]– and to quickly evaluate all the documents provided to me and which I myself got my hands on. I concluded that the “crisis” has two main causes: dependence on the oil sales and the [2014] dizzying fall in prices on the one hand, and Washington’s economic war since 1999, the financial blockade, economic sanctions and all efforts to overthrow Nicolas Maduro through chaos and sabotage on the other.

Before, during and after my visit I suffered a series of threats and a campaign of insults and discredit that I had never suffered in relation to my other thirteen UN reports. Unfortunately, the Office of the High Commissioner did nothing to protect my integrity, my honour or my reputation.

However, I am very pleased to have achieved a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government, which respected my report despite it making some harsh criticisms. The government also took into account several of my recommendations, including the establishment of cooperation agreements with the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN Human Rights Council, etc. Likewise, it heeded my calls for the release of some detainees, including the well-known opponent [and campaign manager to twice presidential candidate Henrique Capriles] Roberto Picón. This I recommended after having spoken to his wife and Roberto Jr. (a very nice young man) and having studied his case, which I considered meritorious.

Caracas has since continued to cooperate with me. In 2018 and early 2019 I personally advocated the release of a German journalist named Billy Six. He was granted freedom. Six published a long article on this in the summer of 2020. In other words, my mission was successful because I did not position myself as an a priori condemner, but went to listen, to learn, to evaluate. I then went on to make pragmatic recommendations which the government evidently considered well-founded.

How do you evaluate other information that has been produced about Venezuela, both by [UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] Mrs Bachelet and also a group of so-called 'independent' experts, people who have also been accused of being involved in human rights violations in Chile and other places?

I had a lot to do with the creation of the Caracas-based Office of the High Commissioner and Michelle Bachelet's personal visit [in 2019]. However, no High Commissioner writes their own report. For that, there is a team in an office, and this team is unfortunately un-professional, very ideologised, neoconservative and a priori contrary to the Bolivarian Revolution.

I had to heavily criticise Bachelet's first report [in July 2019], since it suffered from methodological problems and ignored a large part of the information presented by the government, by the victims of the guarimbas [2014 and 2017 violent street protests led by the opposition], by local organisations such as Fundalatin, Grupo Sures, etc.

Bachelet's second report was better, and she already accepts in her public declarations that there is a significant and adverse impact of unilateral coercive measures, which she has called to be lifted, at least during the Covid-19 crisis. Bachelet has learned – and she listens to me. But she also listens to politicians.

The "report" of the so-called "independent experts" is shameful. They were never in Venezuela and rely on untrustworthy sources.

Based on your experience, what is the responsibility and what is the weight of the hegemonic media in presenting a distorted reality of Venezuela at an international level? What countermeasures can be taken within the institutions in which you work?

The hegemonic media has built a caricature of the situation in Venezuela, which many still believe. I myself had fallen into the trap, and I arrived in Venezuela in November 2017 with a distorted view of the situation.

This is precisely why the hegemonic media tried to bury my report. In September 2018, when my report was submitted to the Human Rights Council, there was no reaction from the press, as I was not singing the song they were expecting. It was in January 2019, following Juan Guaido's self-proclaiming as interim president, that the British journalist Michael Selby-Green did a very long interview with me, which was published in the Independent. After this, I received invitations to be interviewed by Sky News, Euronews, France24, Al Jazeera, ZDF/Arte, Democracy Now, The Real News, etc. I also managed to publish op-eds, but I could never publish or be interviewed by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, to whom I had offered my texts.

I found it surprising and shocking when the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs asked me for an article, which I wrote, and then they did not publish it "because of its content.” Incredible but true: a supposedly academic magazine asks for an article and then censors it.

The attitude of European governments towards Venezuela shows the contradictions that exist in terms of democracy and human rights: on the one hand, thunder against Trump (despite having supported him in his authoritarian and undemocratic attacks on the peoples of the south and defending Biden's arrival). On the other hand, supporting the action of the self-proclaimed Juan Guaido, which is totally outside the parameters of representative democracy. How can this be explained and what could be done to make these elements emerge more so in international institutions?

These people have no shame, they are imperialists and neo-colonialists, they lack morality and coherence. What they do is extremely undemocratic, but they have the corporate press to justify them.

What is happening in the United States highlights the danger posed by the practice of creating false international institutions to approve authoritarian decisions that would not be shared by traditional bodies (such as the Lima Group and its related organisations). What is the awareness of this danger in an institution such as the UN, taking into account the crisis it is going through and which is highlighted by alternative proposals from Southern countries calling for deep UN reform?

The Lima Group is another embarrassment in a world of shameless people, acting in violation of articles 3, 19, 20 and others of the Organisation of American States (OAS) Charter, lending itself to anti-democratic manouvers by the infamous [OAS General Secretary] Luis Almagro and the demented Donald Trump. It's time to move forward with deep reform.

The Community of Latin American and the Caribbean Nations (CELAC) already exists, but after the death of Hugo Chavez and the end of the governments of Luiz Inácio Lula and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, CELAC has lost momentum. What I would like to see is a new Court of Human Rights in Latin America excluding the United States and Canada, whose view of human rights is basically imperialist and neocolonial.

An anti-blockade law was passed in Venezuela [2020]. In terms of international law, what hopes does Venezuela have of effectively counteracting the “sanctions” that have become laws in the United States?

US extraterritorial enforcement laws such as the Helms-Burton Act of 1996 (under the presidency of Bill Clinton!) are illegal under international law. But strength is strength, and the US has blackmailed the whole world.

I don't think the anti-blockade law in Venezuela can change things. This can only be achieved through international solidarity: when 160 countries refuse to implement US extraterritorial laws; when Europeans decide to respond to US sanctions with their own sanctions against the US; when the International Court of Justice takes Venezuela’s case and clearly states that these sanctions are inconsistent with the UN Charter; when the International Criminal Court says sanctions and blockade constitute crimes against humanity as defined in article 7 of the Rome Statutes; when the world recognises that sanctions kill.

(1) Many of these institutions or organisations have been accused by Caracas of politicising human rights to further right-wing, pro-Washington regime change objectives, and of ignoring on-the-ground testimony and evidence presented by government agencies that act to apply justice.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Venezuelanalysis editorial staff.

Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis.


Source: Red Angostura

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/15103
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 06, 2021 2:17 pm

ALERTS, CUBA
Write to In These Times about their smear job on Cuba “the Western Hemisphere’s most undemocratic government”
February 5, 2021

InTheseTimes, a well-known liberal journal, runs an article in its February issue attacking Cuba in a tone akin to the Trump government. It refers to the “repression of the Western Hemisphere’s most undemocratic government,” which they allege to be Cuba. Not Bolsanaro’s Brazil, Chile with its police who blind protesters, Colombia’s death squad supporting government, Honduras’ coup regime, Haiti’s hated rulers, nor the US with its murderous police, but Cuba.

The In These Times article covers, in Voice of America style, the November San Isidro protest in Havana. There, Denis Solis was arrested for refusing to appear for a subpoena and for threatening a police officer. The police did not handcuff him, beat him, tase him, pepper spray him, nor hold a knee on his neck. Solis previously received several fines for disturbing the peace and two official warnings for harassing tourists. He accepted the sentence and did not appeal.
Solis, who declares his love for Donald Trump, admitted to receiving money from a person associated with attacks carried out in Cuba. A group of about twenty, the San Isidro Movement (MSI), soon organized a short “hunger strike” to protest his arrest.

Michael Kozak, undersecretary of the US State Department made statements of support for the San Isidro Movement. Timothy Zuñiga-Brown, Chargé d’affaires for the US Embassy in Cuba visited the group on three occasions and transported some in his car. They received calls of approval from Secretary of State Pompeo. Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the discredited OAS, also chimed in to support the action.

Meanwhile, the US State Department on November 24 quickly announced a new $1 million fund for anti-Cuban government projects that justify allegations of human rights violations in Cuba.
The InTheseTimes article makes no mention of these US government ties or funding to MSI.

Tracey Eaton of Cubamoneyproject.com wrote, “An extensive network of groups financed by the US government sends cash to Cuba to thousands of ‘democracy activists,’ journalists and dissidents every year.” The US has spent between $20-$45 million dollars every year since 1996 to fund Cuban groups with the goal of instituting “regime change” in Cuba.

US Agency for International Development (USAID) and National Endowment for Democracy (NED) have funded at least 54 Cuba “regime change” projects since 2017, with USAID spending $39 million and NED $11 million.
Much of this money goes to US government created media platforms to spread disinformation about Cuban affairs. Hundreds of internet publications have appeared in Florida since 2017 with “Cuba” as part of their on-line names.

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Unlike its progressive coverage of movements in the US, InTheseTimes has maintained a rightwing view on Cuba. Yet, Cuba is heralded around the world for its work in other countries fighting COVID-19. The Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade, working in 53 countries providing this medical care, is proposed for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. The US government has taken a number of measures to worsen the blockade on Cuba, and also adding the baseless declaration that Cuba is a sponsor of international terrorism.

However, In These Times does not cover the cruelty of the US blockade, the exemplary work of Cuban doctors, nor mention the recent documentary The War on Cuba . We urge all defenders of the sovereignty of Cuba and other Latin American countries to write to protest to InTheseTimes at letters@inthesetimes.com or call 773-772-0100.

https://afgj.org/write-to-in-these-times

Basic disinformation procedure: get an audience believing you by providing some good information and maintaining the proper 'tone' then slip in the propaganda all gussied up as 'concern'. Liberals as bad as conservatives and less honest. These people are not friends of the working class, they are a 'fifth column', a poison pill, and there will never be a genuine working class movement until liberalism is expelled from the councils of the left. Which is not to say that individual liberals cannot join up, but it must be on working class terms.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 10, 2021 3:28 pm

Claims Of Chinese 'Debt Trap Diplomacy' Are Propaganda - (Told You So)
In June 2018 we debunked a New York Times piece which accused China of 'financial imperialism'.

China's Port In Sri Lanka's Is Good Business - The NYT's Report On It Is Propaganda

The core of the NYT piece was about the Chinese financed development of the Hambantota port in Sri Lanka:

'China's financial imperialism' is a relatively new genre in western journalism. China is providing loans to other countries to build infrastructure. If those countries can not pay back the loans, China offers to lease and manage the infrastructure built with its money. That somehow is supposed to create a "debt trap for vulnerable countries".
Yesterday the New York Times lamented about Sri Lanka's Hambantota Port Development Project:
...
The port is in a strategic location right alongside the shipping lines between Asia and the Middle East and Africa.

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There were several inconsistencies in the NYT piece. It used old statistics to claim that the port was rarely used. However up-to-date statistics proved the opposite. It also lied about Sri Lanka's debt burden only 10% of which was to China.

Thirty two months after Moon of Alabama debunked the piece, and twenty nine months after Peter Lee (aka Chinahand) did similar in greater detail, The Atlantic sets out to do the same:

The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth

The narrative wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with.

It notes that the New York Times anti-China propaganda piece was often used by the Trump administration to attack that country:

The Trump administration pointed to Hambantota to warn of China’s strategic use of debt: In 2018, former Vice President Mike Pence called it “debt-trap diplomacy”—a phrase he used through the last days of the administration—and evidence of China’s military ambitions. Last year, erstwhile Attorney General William Barr raised the case to argue that Beijing is “loading poor countries up with debt, refusing to renegotiate terms, and then taking control of the infrastructure itself.”
But the NYT's central claim of 'finance imperialism' was completely wrong:

Our research shows that Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country, much less the port of Hambantota. A Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in the port was a cautionary tale, but it’s not the one we’ve often heard. With a new administration in Washington, the truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.
The Atlantic piece is well researched and it thoroughly destroyed the case the New York Times had tried to make. It also caught the NYT in an outright lie. The original NYT piece had claimed in its second paragraph:

feasibility studies said the port wouldn’t work

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The Atlantic authors however found two studies that said the opposite:

It was the Canadian International Development Agency—not China—that financed Canada’s leading engineering and construction firm, SNC-Lavalin, to carry out a feasibility study for the port. We obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents detailing this effort through a Freedom of Information Act request. The study, concluded in 2003, confirmed that building the port at Hambantota was feasible, and supporting documents show that the Canadians’ greatest fear was losing the project to European competitors.
...
We reviewed a second feasibility report, produced in 2006 by the Danish engineering firm Ramboll, that made similar recommendations to the plans put forward by SNC-Lavalin, arguing that an initial phase of the project should allow for the transport of non-containerized cargo—oil, cars, grain—to start bringing in revenue, before expanding the port to be able to handle the traffic and storage of traditional containers.

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They also found, just like MoA did, that the port debt to China was not relevant for Sri Lanka's payment problems:

Sri Lanka owed more to Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank than to China. Of the $4.5 billion in debt service Sri Lanka would pay in 2017, only 5 percent was because of Hambantota. The Central Bank governors under both Rajapaksa and Sirisena do not agree on much, but they both told us that Hambantota, and Chinese finance in general, was not the source of the country’s financial distress.
The authors of the Atlantic piece, who are professors at John Hopkins and Harvard, conclude that there is no Chinese 'financial imperialism'. The whole concept is wrong:

The notion of “debt-trap diplomacy” casts China as a conniving creditor and countries such as Sri Lanka as its credulous victims. On a closer look, however, the situation is far more complex. China’s march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental, a learning process marked by frequent adjustment. After the construction of the port in Hambantota, for example, Chinese firms and banks learned that strongmen fall and that they’d better have strategies for dealing with political risk. They’re now developing these strategies, getting better at discerning business opportunities and withdrawing where they know they can’t win. Still, American leaders and thinkers from both sides of the aisle give speeches about China’s “modern-day colonialism.”
'Financial imperialism' and 'modern-day colonialism' is what the U.S. exercises when it blocks IMF and Worldbank loans or binds them to political conditions. China is so far not known for doing such.

Thanks to The Atlantic for debunking that anti-China dreck the NYT had put on its frontpage.

Just one question: What took you so long?

h/t Ian Goodrum

Posted by b on February 9, 2021 at 18:20 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/02/c ... .html#more

Two factions of the ruling class, China investors and China hawks, duking it out in the public prints, the short term interests of some capitalists vs the long term interest of capital. The 'short-termers' acting as a shield, however inadvertently, as China continues to develop. Is this something like 'selling rope'?
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:08 pm

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A mass demonstration is held in front of Federal Courthouse in New York City, June 6, 1949, to protest against the 'Communist conspiracy' show trial. The defendants, leaders of the Communist Party USA, were charged under the Smith Act. Joining the picket line at Foley Square are the wives of three of the twelve defendants, starting third from left, Lillian Gates, wife of Daily Worker editor John Gates; Fern Winston, wife of CPUSA leader Henry Winston; and Elizabeth Hall, wife of Ohio CP leader Gus Hall. | AP

Is CNN jumping on the red-baiting bandwagon?
Posted Feb 13, 2021 by Eds.

Originally published: People's World By Tony Pecinovsky (February 4, 2021) |

A recent CNN article outrageously tried to put communists who were victims of U.S. government attacks in 1948 in the same boat with the criminal Trumpites who staged the attempted coup at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The headline on the Feb. 3 article by Eliott C. McLaughlin read: “With coup label, Capitol rioters join communist party in plotting against USA, university project says.” The reportage was beyond just the “fake news” Trump has so often falsely attributed to CNN. This article represented the worst in sloppy journalism, with the author making no attempt to match any of his claims to reality. He simply regurgitates long-discredited Cold War lies.

McLaughlin displays an agonizing disregard for historical accuracy by regurgitating a claim made by the University of Illinois’ Cline Center for Advanced Social Research Coup D’état Project that claims the Communist Party, USA, like the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol, once plotted to overthrow the U.S. government.

In fact, the two have nothing in common.

One group–the CPUSA–has sought to protect and expand democracy, while the other–the January 6 insurrectionists–sought to violently overthrow our democracy.

What evidence does McLaughlin provide? How does he substantiate the claim that the Communist Party plotted against the U.S.? What scholarly books or journals are consulted?

The evidence is laughable. In all, the Coup D’état Project’s global database–his source–devotes three sentences to the CPUSA.

Communist Party leaders Gus Hall, left, and Henry Winston were among those charged in the Smith Act frame-up trials of the late 1940s. Here, they walk down a corridor of the Federal building in New York City, Oct. 13, 1949, to hear the final arguments in their nine-month trial. Hall at the time was chairman of he Communist Party in Ohio and Winston was the national organizing secretary. | AP
Gus Hall, left, and Henry Winston, two leaders in Communist party circles in the U.S., walk down a corridor of the Federal building in New York City, Oct. 13, 1949, to hear the final arguments in their nine-month trial. Hall is chairman of he Communist party in Ohio and Winston is the national organizing secretary. The two have been in jail between court sessions after being found in contempt of court by Judge Harold R. Medina. (AP Photo)

The database notes that the CPUSA’s leaders were “put on trial” under the provisions of the Smith Act, which is true.

The trials lasted “at least a decade.” This is also true.

Several CPUSA members were “convicted but few served jail time.” This is all correct.

However, the Coup D’état Project and McLaughlin only tell part of the story–the least important part at that. They omit the climax, the main point. Additionally, they leave out all of the context.

As all historians know, purposeful omission is falsification. The Coup D’état Project and McLaughlin have committed the cardinal sin by omitting the fact that the leaders of the CPUSA were never found guilty of any overt act.

During the Smith Act court hearings, the government’s so-called evidence consisted of rumor, hearsay, and fabrication, often perpetrated by paid FBI informants, like Harvey Matusow, who later recanted their testimony.

Their only other source of evidence were the speeches, articles, pamphlets, books, and reports–all widely disseminated–published by a legal political party whose members had contributed mightily to the struggle for social and economic justice; whose members sacrificed valiantly in the fight against fascism during World War II.

The Smith Act itself was later found to be unconstitutional; the Supreme Court ruled that defendants could only be prosecuted for their actions, not their beliefs.

Never were Communists charged with or convicted of an overt act. Never were they charged with or convicted of stockpiling or conspiring to use weapons.

They were only charged with and convicted of holding unpopular beliefs, Marxism-Leninism, of being Communists.

None of this is mentioned in McLaughlin’s article.

In short, the 11 leaders of the CPUSA were found guilty of violating an Act which itself was later found to be unconstitutional. Perhaps, McLaughlin could have provided CNN readers with this context.

This is an important point. McLaughlin does his readers a disservice by perpetuating the worst of the Cold War-Red Scare lies–lies that honest historians, such as Gerald Horne, have debunked.

Demonstrators hold up copies of the Daily Worker, predecessor of People’s World, outside the Federal Courthouse in New York during the frame-up trial of Communist Party leaders. | People’s World Archives
Demonstrators hold up copies of the Daily Worker, predecessor of People’s World, outside the Federal Courthouse in New York during the frame-up trial of Communist Party leaders. | People’s World Archives

He also unwittingly legitimizes “memory projects,” as historian Kristen Ghodsee termed it, that celebrate those who worked to constrain democratic liberties while simultaneously vilifying those who championed workers’ rights, African American equality, and peace, such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Benjamin Davis, Jr., Henry Winston, and Gus Hall, all victims of the Smith Act frame-up.

Furthermore, it is now widely agreed that the CPUSA’s defense against the Smith Act was in fact a defense of the Bill of Rights that protected all Americans from government overreach into their private political beliefs and right of association, a foundational cornerstone of our Constitution.

Far from a coup attempt, the Communist Party’s defense against the Smith Act was part of the American radical democratic tradition–the complete opposite of the January 6 insurrection, which sought to overthrow our democracy.

The Coup D’état Project is not the only source on this subject and should not be presented as if it has the final word.

McLaughlin and CNN have a responsibility to provide accurate information and multiple sources. Unfortunately, they pass the buck.

This is not only bad journalism, it’s disingenuous. And in this case it actually is fake news.

CNN should retract this article and issue an apology to its readers and to the Communist Party.

https://mronline.org/2021/02/13/is-cnn- ... bandwagon/

CNN sets the table for a 'fair and balanced' attack upon all 'extremists'. In this way the Biden regime can claim a 'non-partisan' high ground the crusade to "keep Americans safe". Look for organizers and potential leaders to be persecuted at the least pretense. Remember the Black Panthers and keep in mind the unusual spate of deaths of the leaders of the Ferguson uprising.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 16, 2021 1:45 pm

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Scientists on WHO mission to Wuhan accuse media of biased reportage
Posted Feb 16, 2021 by Steve Sweeney

Originally published: Morning Star (February 14, 2021) |

SCIENTISTS on a World Health Organisation (WHO) mission to Wuhan to look at the origins of the coronavirus outbreak have accused Western media of “twisting” quotes to fit an anti-China narrative.

The U.S. government and many media outlets have queried WHO findings that do not corroborate theories promoted by Washington, such as the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory.

In a statement on Friday U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Washington had “deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them.”

But British zoologist Peter Daszak, who was part of the WHO mission in China said that claims China had refused to hand over data were untrue.

“This was not my experience on the WHO mission. As lead of the animal/environment working group I found trust and openness with my China counterparts. We did get access to critical new data throughout. We did increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways,” he said.

“New data included environment and animal carcass testing, names of suppliers to Huanan market, analyses of excess mortality in Hubei, range of Covid-like symptoms for months prior, sequence data linked to early cases and site visits with unvetted live Q&A etc. All in report coming soon,” the expert explained.

In a swipe at reporting of the mission’s work, he tweeted:
It’s disappointing to spend time w/ journalists explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China, to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began. Shame on you @nytimes.
Danish mission member Thea Koelsen Fischer said that scientists’ quotes were being “intendedly twisted, casting shadows over important scientific work.”

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman reminded the U.S. that the WHO “is an authoritative multilateral international organization in the field of health, not a fun-fair where one can come and go at will.”

China called for the U.S. to “hold itself to the highest standards” of openness and transparency saying “the whole world will be looking.”

https://mronline.org/2021/02/16/scienti ... reportage/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:41 pm

Democracy Now Provides Progressive Cover to State Department Propaganda Campaign Against China
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 24 Feb 2021

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Democracy Now Provides Progressive Cover to State Department Propaganda Campaign Against China
The show has become a reliable platform for uncritical regime change propaganda, demonizing targets of US empire from Syria to Nicaragua.

“DN often acts as a force multiplier for the State Department.”

The U.S. has claimed a humanitarian “Responsibility to Protect” to justify military operations in the name of saving civilian lives from evil dictators. Most notable have been the brutal U.S.-led wars in Libya and Syria which destabilized entire regions in the name of “civilian protection” and “promoting democracy.” These operations relied heavily on self-described human rights NGO’s and media outlets to cultivate support among liberal sectors of the US intelligentsia. Sadly, Democracy Now has been among the most influential and insidious outlets carrying water for the humanitarian interventionist agenda.

The flagship program of the left-wing Pacifica radio network, Democracy Now (DN) and its founding host, Amy Goodman, are regarded as standard bearers of grassroots progressivism. However, in recent years the show has become a reliable platform for uncritical regime change propaganda, demonizing targets of US empire from Syria to Nicaragua while sending a correspondent to embed with US-backed “rebels” in Libya. Now that China is in the crosshairs of the US, DN is playing host to virtually any piece of humanitarian agitprop that Washington can conjure up, while publishing a regular serving of sharply negative stories about Chinese government and society.

“DN is playing host to virtually any piece of humanitarian agitprop that Washington can conjure up.”

A review by The Grayzone of every China-related report and interview Democracy Now aired in the past year found that 3 out of every 4 painted China in a decidedly negative light, often echoing narratives emanating from the US State Department. Perhaps its most inflammatory and factually questionable report appeared this February amid an escalating wave of anti-China propaganda.

On February 4th, DN aired a story on the latest moral outrage out of China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It was a report from the BBC, the British Foreign Office-funded media giant that was exposed by The Grayzone as a UK intelligence contractor. Instead of questioning the BBC’s report, which appeared custom-tailored to generate public support for the new Cold War, Democracy Now uncritically amplified it.

DN’s story opened with the BBC’s interview of Tursunay Ziawudun, the singular source for accusations of “mass rape” in so-called re-education camps in Xinjiang. Democracy Now repeated the US-based exile’s claims as fact without any investigation into the credibility of the source. Ziawudun is no stranger to the Western press. In fact, prior interviews with Ziawudun reveal several glaring inconsistencies that place her credibility as a source into question.

Ziawudun was first interviewed by a human rights organization in Kazakhstan called Atajurt. The group possesses no formal website or information about donors, only social media accounts. In 2018, directors of Atajurt junketed to Washington DC to meet with the National Endowment for Democracy and various anti-China influencers.

“Democracy Now repeated the US-based exile’s claims as fact without any investigation into the credibility of the source.”

Neither Ziawudun’s interviews with this organization nor her testimony to the CIA-created Radio Free Asia mention rape at all. In a feature with Buzzfeed in February of 2020, Ziawudun stated, “I wasn’t beaten or abused… The hardest part was mental. It’s something I can’t explain – you suffer mentally. Being kept someplace and forced to stay there for no reason. You have no freedom. You suffer.”

Ziawudun’s reflection on her experience changed character after she became involved with the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP). The UHRP was created and is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US intelligence passthrough that was established under the watch of former CIA director William Casey.

The Grayzone exposed the Uyghur Human Rights Project as part of a consortium of groups operating under the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) umbrella, and funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year in US government money to promote the narrative of a Uyghur genocide carried out by China’s government.

In September 2020, the UHRP resettled Ziawudun in the United States, flying her from Kazakhstan to the Washington DC area. “Ms. Tursunay is a critical witness…,” the US government-funded organization declared in a press release. “Her testimony will be vitally important for future atrocity-crimes determination processes and tribunals.”

“The UHRP was created and is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US intelligence passthrough.”

In a CNN report based on her contradictory claims alleging a Chinese policy of “systematic rape,” her Chinese passport briefly appeared on screen. It showed that after all her alleged travails, she was granted a ten year visa to travel abroad as she pleased. Yet CNN reported she “walked across the Kazakh border” in 2019, creating the impression she had to escape from China to tell her horror story. In a subsequent broadcast of its report, CNN blurred out Ziawadun’s passport issue date.

Democracy Now did not mention Ziawudun’s apparent recruitment by the US government or her dramatically shifting story in its coverage. Instead, it invited a cast of guests from Washington’s anti-China echo chamber on to discuss her story.

Among them was so-called “linguist,” Abdulweli Ayup, who spent two years in the United States as a fellow for the Ford Foundation and has interviewed more than a half-dozen times with Radio Free Asia, a US government propaganda network founded by the CIA. Ayup’s biography was published in a lengthy report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project, the same NED-backed organization which helped Tusurnay Ziawudun resettle in the United States.

U.S. academic Darren Byler rounded out Democracy Now’s panel on the BBC report. Byler is a fellow at the Wilson Center , a DC-based think tank funded by the US Congress, the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates, and a host of Wall Street big banks including Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase. Former U.S. General and CIA director David Petraeus and BP share important council positions for the organization.

Byler is a regular source of quotes advancing the US government’s Cold War posture against China. He has framed Beijing’s counter-terrorism policy in Xinjiang as the political and military equivalent of the United States’ post 9/11 War on Terror, omitting the historical context of dozens of documented mass casualty attacks by the separatist Al Qaeda affiliate known as the East Turkestan Islamic Front in the region between the years of 1990 and 2016. He was even quoted in an article by the State Department-funded Coda Story attacking The Grayzone alongside other US government sponsored anti-China pundits.

An email to Democracy Now staff requesting a comment on its relentless parade of anti-China coverage and steady stream of dubious, US government-sponsored guests went unanswered.

Democracy Now’s coverage of China over the past year has been almost entirely negative. A content analysis by The Grayzone of DN headlines directly referencing China from February 1st 2020 to the present reveals that 54 of 69 (78 percent) presented a sharply negative spin on events. The vast majority of the stories focused on “human rights” in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, echoing narratives generated by the US national security state. Some emanated directly from hardline Trump administration officials like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton .

“Democracy Now’s coverage of China over the past year has been almost entirely negative.”

The other fifteen DN stories could be considered “neutral” in tone. They centered on developments surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Even here, however, DN’s bias toward China stood out. For example, in a headline about a small outbreak of Covid in China in April 2020, DN editors placed scare quotes around the word “imported” in order to cast doubt on Beijing’s claim that the virus originated abroad. Meanwhile, the outlet has offered nothing but praise for the pro-US government of Taiwan’s successful pandemic response.

While Democracy Now appears to have deemed the US’s Cold War-style policies toward China as unworthy of criticism, the flagship progressive program found time to host so-called Xinjiang expert Adrian Zenz in 2019 . Zenz, a far right Christian fundamentalist member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who claims to be “led by God” against the Communist Party of China, is an odd guest for a supposedly left-wing program.

In analysis of Zenz’s research paper accusing China of forced sterilization and genocide in Xinjiang, The Grayzone’s Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal found wanton manipulation of data, major errors and a number of missing footnotes. Despite his clear credibility issues, Zenz is without question the most cited source in the U.S. and West on all matters relating to Xinjiang.

“DN found time to host so-called Xinjiang expert Adrian Zenz, a far right Christian fundamentalist member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who claims to be ‘led by God.’”

Democracy Now provided Zenz a platform despite the fact his most constantly repeated claim that over one million Uygurs are being detained in “concentration camps” was based on a mere two sources: a total of eight interviews conducted by the NED-backed, Washington DC-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders and a single television report from a Turkish-based Uygur exile organization.

Under the Trump national security doctrine, which has been largely retained by the Biden administration, the US proclaimed China and Russia to be the greatest threats it faces on the global stage. The truth is that China’s emphasis on poverty alleviation, multilateral cooperation, and economic growth coupled with its growing political independence is seen as an existential threat to the United States’ continued hegemony. As the US charts a dangerous course toward war with China, authentically independent investigative journalism and activism is required to prioritize peace over access to the powerful.

Unfortunately, while Democracy Now has marketed itself as “the exception to the rulers,” it is functioning as little more than a force multiplier for the State Department, amplifying Cold War narratives on China behind progressive cover.

This article previously appeared in The Gray Zone .

https://www.blackagendareport.com/democ ... inst-china
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 28, 2021 3:23 pm

(Where does stream-of-consciousness end and Google Translator begin? Nonetheless, interesting commentary on perception management. And why, despite it all, we will win.)

FEBRUARY 27 AND 28, 1989: BIG FALSE POSITIVE

The Cayapo

27 Feb 2021 , 7:38 pm .

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February 27, 1989, Caracas, Venezuela (Photo: Tom Grillo)

To speak of February 27 and 28, 1989, as well as February 4, 1992, it is necessary to have some insights that place us in this feat.

Some intellectuals, politicians, activists, have always recognized that it is the peoples who carry out the events, although it is also known that these events have always obeyed plans in accordance with the interests of the owners, which of course justify it by saying that they are for the benefit of the people, the homeland, god or whoever helps them achieve their goals throughout the long bustle of this species ruled by elites all over the planet.

And the facts are not exactly a pretty pod. Tumults, massacres, beheaded, shootings, hangings, blood, vomit, crying, mucus, shit. It is terrible how events have happened up to this moment. They are the owners herding slave-soldiers to stay above other owners, and from time to time the slave insurrections, often spurred on by the owners, to take over the hacienda-factory of other owners where the poor always end up leading the package.

But when it comes to describing these vicissitudes, the official story appears, that is, the story of the owners who pay good or badly to some intellectuals specialized in the matter of telling what is convenient for the master and it is this story that is transmitted by schools and other ideological apparatuses as unquestionable truth, where we are told that those who direct it are immaculate beings, well dressed, with flowery language, not on foot, always on horses or in cars or planes or boats, with knowledge outside serial, demigods, heroes, who on the contrary face ferocious and demonic beings who are the defeated, this defeated can be a people invaded, looted and murdered, or another owner. But the most summit is that the soldiers or victims of these tragedies are blurred and they return us to the slavery of always.

We write these words as an abbreviation to try to explain to ourselves what happened to us in those stormy days of February and part of March 1989 and the years that follow, because even today they continue to speak of "insurrection" or "popular uprising", in the case of those who treat us best, but the bourgeois story labeled us murderers, thieves, looters.

For us, 1989 was intended to be a masterstroke for the corporations to finish upsetting a mining state, because since 1970 a plan had already been working that consisted of privatizing the entire state.

First, the left is defeated, it is discredited and those who remained alive are bought, imprisoned, exiled or simply killed if they do not adhere to any other rule that satisfies the victors. With the left, all political parties are beginning to discredit, politics is shit, politics is useless, politics is made up of thieves, politics destroys the country, that campaign goes to the streets so that nobody wants to participate in politics because politics is rubbish; That was the advice that was released by all the media. A novel that was called by these streets became famous that was by rctv, where they expressed all that kind of thing.

The state is useless, corrupt, does not work, does not work, etc. etc. etc. They put us in the collective imagination that governments did not work, that politicians did not serve or unions, but that was accompanied by buying union leaders, buying political parties, leaders, they bought them and then made it public and visible that they bought so and so They accused the other of corruption and some papers appeared there. There are many papers full of acts of corruption in the country, this is happening in all the countries of Latin America, not only in Venezuela; in Chile, with the great military coup against Allende, in 1973; the military coups that occurred in Argentina; in Colombia, with the paramilitarized irregular war; in Ecuador the same, with numbers of corrupt presidents who appeared and continue to appear the same; in Peru,

But this story is dead, if we do not know that from 1914 when oil investments began by large corporations in Venezuela until the 1960s all that industry became junk. So the oil companies designed a plan to recover the entire production system without having to invest half in its recovery. Carlos Andrés Pérez, under a policy called the nationalization of oil, nationalized oil "now the oil is ours" and as a consequence the state began to invest large amounts of resources to recover this industry; Until at the end of 1980, Venezuela had the oil industry fully recovered, it was beautiful, PDVSA was a cup of gold and a campaign began that we Venezuelans could not manage, that we were very corrupt, that the government was very corrupt, that it was necessary to privatize and the campaign continued, to hell with the central bank, the bolivar was devalued, the dollar began to rise in 1983 under the government of Luis Herrera Campin and after that, everything came that deterioration and in 1989 the famous outbreak occurs, people go out into the streets, but that is another event that was staged, it was a movie, a staging; Anyone who has been a worker knows that there is almost always a fight on the bus, the subway, the truck, when we go to work and there is always someone who pushes or puts a hand on women, and there are yelling, poking and slapping, then, the driver threatens to start or says they get off my shit, and that's where the joke ends, because it really starts and leaves everyone understanding, and no one wants to lose their job, And there never in those fights, no journalist appears, taking a picture of anyone, they go to the neighborhood when they notify that there is a dead person, that the CICPC arrives, that is when they arrive if they see that it is a massacre, some gangs that fell down. , but that day precisely in Guarenas which is a dormitory city, the television cameras were there, it was not that there was a reporter from any newspaper, no, no, it was rctv and venevision, from now on it was watching on TV and listening on radio, they are looting in such a part and also in Maracaibo and here you see people organized by the police ... and it was noon and the TV was promoting looting ... the police barriers were overcome ... how is it that the police barriers were overcome? Nowhere in the world does that happen, but the yellow vests say it, the blacks in the United States,

Because that had one objective, to discredit the people who had not been able to discredit him to carry out their plans, they could not accuse us of thieves, corrupt, politicians, they could accuse us individually of criminals but as a person not as a people, then What the guys did, the only way to destroy us is to become a looting thief, a public thief and that is why they did all that great montage, there is a book by Paulina Gamus where she says that at 2 in the afternoon of that day February 27, She had a meeting of the executive committee of democratic action and that when they said they were burning Caracas, she looked out from the penthouse where they were meeting and she saw and said, not in Caracas, nothing is happening, because it was a lie, here she was not nothing happening, it was just a staging,a vulgar false positive, they made a great movie, like that montage of the green square in Tripolis that they said there are killing people, and it was a montage they made in Kuwait and showed to the world, as if it were in Libya that it was already happening In Venezuela it had happened 32 years before, to become thieves, in the morning we were heroes, the poor people looting because they are hungry, gasoline increased the passage, and after noon they kill those rabid dogs lambe, those are looters, thieves Assassins, they are attacking the Chinese, of course the looting happened, because if they tell me that the police are not going to do anything to me, it is clear that I am going to look for TV, I am going to look for a car, I am going to find what I get, they needed to discredit us as a people and they succeeded.

The other institution that they had not been able to discredit was the army, because how do you get involved with the army without it being a pain in the neck? It was then necessary to turn the army into a murderer, because they were the institutions in Venezuela that they had not been able to discredit; the people, the army and the majesty of the presidency of the Republic, who could not be disgraced with a simple propaganda campaign, verifiable facts were needed, so they sullied the people through looting, the army was vilified as a murderer of the people , because they threw him into the street with the express order to kill people, they killed more than 3,000 people in a week, there was no more looting and they continued to kill people, terrorizing the people and the third element of that move was to defame the magnificence of the presidency of the republic they had already disqualified the parties, unions, politicians and they lacked the presidency and they do it with a damn that was even the most voted before After Chávez, his inauguration was called the coronation, until Fidel Castro came, Carlos Andrés began a historic cycle in Venezuela in 1973 that ended in 1993. How did Carlos Andrés Pérez come out? Like a rat for 260 million bolivars, they sue the guy who is rotten in silver, what are they going to be doing for two hundred and sixty million, who surely also stole them? That he would spend with his friends on a party, but they needed to discredit the presidency, the president of the republic is a vulgar chorus,

The plan worked wonderfully for them, so much so, that there was no questioning, the world bought the story and everything was going well for the guys.

But, always a but, a fact occurs that was not among the probabilities, the Chávez case, Chávez was not in anyone's plans, Chávez was not known by anyone in the public groups, he was not a politician, he was not a military man of "Prestige" among job and money hunters, one more poor man who gets into a military career to get out of the bottom, as all the military thought or how those who study engineering, those who study medicine think, I am going to graduate to be someone in life, it turns out that Chávez's insurrection appears and that disrupts the plans of the guys because who is this military man? And incidentally, they make the mistake of making him speak in public, when Chávez speaks in public for those 20 seconds and the guy says I am responsible for these events and other times will come,

But the bourgeoisie tries to buy Chávez, make him fall in love with women, rial, brandy, but he is not a traditional military man, a greedy man, he let them run and was supported by venevision, the national and others who believed that they would control him when he was president, for the belief that every poor person is an asshole, give him a piece of bread so you can see how they pull a ball.

But he had a plan and not only did he have it but he made it public, we need a law that will make us a country and for that we need a new constitution; he graduates as president and once he signs a decree calling for the constitution, keeps his word, the referendum was held, the constituent was approved, the bourgeoisie says, but until when? and Chávez introduces a law in Congress with 49 enabling laws to govern, in order to take the country out from below and the government, as it had a majority in Congress, approves the enabling law, among the fundamental enabling laws are the energy and mining law, of aquaculture and fishing, and the land law 3 laws that directly affect the interests of the owners and that is when they give the coup, but in less than 48 hours there is a counter coup of the civil-military union.

Because if Chávez knew something, it was that we were not independent, we were not sovereign, that it was pure on paper, that it took a long time, prepared, educated, scientific people, people who understand that the country does not belong to them but that we belong to the country. , people who love, who fully inherit their affections for the territory, people who not only have knowledge but are capable of collectively planning the productive independence of the territory, and for this task all people without the need for titles, trades or professions, be they man, woman, child, old man, removing from our brains that ideological plague that only wise men can do things because they are the ones who know; everyone can contribute to building in the future a country that brings us all together.

There is a detail that is important to say, from 1989 to here the shadow of the civil war has always been over this country because everyone wanted to solve the problem with a clean ass, everyone wanted the civil war, everyone we We refer to power, because the corporations won with the civil war, the oil companies, the gold owners, won with the civil war, we lost because the armies are made up of the poor, whatever side we are, the rich or the poor, Since Chávez appeared until now the civil war has been paralyzed, avoided, it is in the poor interest of us that there is never a civil war in Venezuela, because since there is no civil war it is easier to achieve the objectives that we set ourselves.because the potential of the owners is running out and we can dedicate ourselves to calmly thinking about the construction of the country.

Since 1989, thirty-two years of saints and collapsed platforms have passed, in every sense, the political parties of all signs have been blurred, unions, unions, NGOs and other organic forms that have served to bring people together in the name of this or that interest, the ideologies of all the signs and colors today totally discredited, are sold to three per lochas and one of ñapa, the churches have shown their monstrous side, their hidden miseries, the academies and schools are repeated in pamphlet, the arts and artists of all types are sold to the highest bidder like peddlers selling trinkets on street corners, professions are impoverished and professionals are debased in the hopelessness of not being able to fulfill the illusion of being rich, capitalism walks with its buttocks out showing its pestilences.

1989 coincides with the great unease manifested by the capitalist production apparatus, its imaginary and cultural construct, humanism throughout the planet, a culture that pretends to substitute for God as before the holders of God tried to substitute paganism. 1989 is that dumdum bullet, which explodes in the face of the bourgeois plans, tearing the veil that protects it and exposes it in all its pandemics that consume the species and life in all its forms.

1989, places us at a point where we can continue to condemn, curse, blame; After everything that happened, it is the job of the idiot, because the poor taught us in 1989, we are not born, they manufacture us, so that factories bury their factories because life goes to life, let's not allow tragedy to inherit from now on that sustains the dead of tomorrow today. The idea of ​​the future must be thought by the dead that we will not live tomorrow. Dreaming of those who do not yet exist is the greatest substantial transcendence of the miserable being that capitalism built us.

Those who dreamed of us did so in distress, in need; marked by hunger, fear and ignorance; let us not dream to the others under these premises, that a calm verse makes them be at their juncture.

Let us not dream as anciently they dreamed of us, like a horde following chimeras, sustained by hopes and utopias of non-existent worlds, but always consuming ourselves in inaccurate destinies and futures, let us imagine together knowing fully, without the hunger and fears that have made us miseries, let's dream, let's dream of others without us contaminating everything.

Let us dedicate the few drops of energy that capitalism has not yet stolen from us to design with joy those we will not see, that selfishness does not cloud the understanding and we can understand that the detachment of today will be the joy of those who will live tomorrow.

If we work for today, we will die forever, because the dead do not applaud the future.

The life of the innocents of 1989 already lives in us, as a possibility of being born in the others that we will no longer be in that joy paid by all.

https://misionverdad.com/chavismo/27-y- ... o-positivo

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 05, 2021 2:05 pm

Against Big Tech's Algorithmic Cancel Culture
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 03 Mar 2021

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Against Big Tech's Algorithmic Cancel Culture
Project Censored Host Mickey Huff predicted that #CancelCulture warriors would be calling stations to complain about his opposition to Big Tech censorship, writes Ann Garrison.

“They mostly use these tools against progressive movements, against people's movements, against communities of color and people on the margins.”

This week Polina Vasiliev and I spoke to Mickey Huff , Diablo Valley College history and media studies professor, Director of Project Censored, and host of Pacifica Radio’s Project Censored Show, for Pacifica’s “Covid, Race, and Democrac y” about Big Tech censorship, including censorship of dissidence regarding COVID-19. This is a transcript of that conversation.

Ann Garrison: What has been the fate of your Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas held last fall and then, as I understand it, disappeared from the YouTube.

Mickey Huff: Indeed, it did. And thanks for having me on to discuss these issues. The Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas , the lead organizer for that is Dr. Nolan Higdon , whom I've worked with for years on various things. And Project Censored was a co-sponsor of this event. It was also co-sponsored by several academic institutions, including UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and Cal State across the State of California. So, in other words, as I’ve mentioned in a couple of other interviews, Alan Macleod over at Mint Press News, did a pretty in-depth piece on this. I know you talked about it; I think in a Black Agenda Report piece. This is an ongoing issue. This is an issue of Big Tech gatekeeping, algorithmic censorship.

We have not been able to get any real feedback from YouTube about what happened, except that they, in true Orwellian fashion, flipped the script, and basically tried to say that Nolan didn't upload the videos or that the videos maybe didn't exist in the first place. They were able to find one of the videos, the keynote, and the more irony there is that one of the keynote presenters was scholar Dr. S afiya Noble , who wrote a book a couple of years ago called “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism ” about YouTube censorship and deplatforming, particularly of BIPOC communities. And we at Project Censored have covered YouTube’s algorithmic censorship of LGBTQI communities. That was actually in our Censored 2020 book. Andy Lee Roth and April Anderson wrote a whole chapter on Stonewall. Then they wrote another piece for Index on Censorship . We've been on this case for a while only to interestingly find ourselves at the receiving end of Big Tech censorship last fall. So there aren't any major updates other than we're still trying to see what happened.

“This is an issue of Big Tech gatekeeping, algorithmic censorship.”

Nolan has a great steering committee of people who are planning the next conference, which will be held next October—the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas—and we'll have information at ProjectCensored.org about that. And we're also talking about it in several places. We're probably bringing it to the media literacy conference in the summer. I've been talking to several people on several shows about it. But the interesting thing is that when contacting YouTube again, they had almost nothing to say about it other than to flip the script and pretend that it didn't happen. I actually had to procure emails that proved that we had screenshots. We had email links of the conference. We had screenshots of other academics sharing it online. We were using this as curriculum in college classrooms on several different campuses.

So for YouTube to pretend that this didn't happen is just absolutely insane, for lack of a more articulate phrase. And then they said, well, we don't know what to do. Can you re-upload the videos? And this isn't about re-uploading anything. Fortunately, we do have the videos. Nolan has the video. He could spend another two days of his life uploading them, but he already did that. And there was no warning of the entire channel being disappeared.

Now let me be clear. This isn't the Project Censored channel at YouTube, right? This is a specific channel that was set up for the Critical Media Literacy Conference of the Americas. It was its inaugural of what's going to be an annual conference. It is a conference that is diverse. It is critical, and it is comprised of more radical academics, particularly those that are calling out Big Tech censorship among other issues. So that this channel was disappeared without warning, without notice, without explanation, without redress, is incredibly notable, because they're going to come after—even algorithmically—a bunch of critical media literacy scholars.

Some of you all know what we do and what we talk about. And it's not necessarily riveting YouTube material per se. It's academic. So this kind of thing’s been happening across the spectrum. And of course, we see that there are strange cheers of glee coming from liberal sectors, whenever people from Donald Trump to Alex Jones are deplatformed.

“They're going to come after—even algorithmically—a bunch of critical media literacy scholars.”

Even Alan Macleod wrote a piece for Mint Press News that was demonetized online. I mean, we all know that, when these tech companies and liberals are crowing for censorship, there might be a few targets on the right that are censored, but they mostly always come after the left. They mostly use these tools against progressive movements, against people's movements, against communities of color and people on the margins. And this time they algorithmically, we assume, came after us. And again, I don't know what else to say about it at this point, because we just don't have more information.

So we're saying, “Well, we don't know what happened in the first place, and it's time-consuming to upload these videos. So we're better off likely just uploading them onto our own platforms.” Of course we could use Vimeo or something else, but that's beside the point, right? I mean, just recently, Greg Palast was talking about Consortium News being censored by YouTube. It's almost every day of the week now that you go and see there's yet another organization, another journalist, another group being de-platformed by these Big Tech companies.

And the bigger question is: “How did these private, for-profit Big Tech businesses get control of the public sphere in the first place?” Right? That's our big concern at Project Censored. In a proprietary way, these companies, unfortunately, do have the legal right to censor or curate content, but that's beside the point overall, given that now these half a dozen or so huge tech monopolies now have control over many of these internet platforms where most people are going not only to get news and information, but also to get their messages out. And we think that's a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

“When these tech companies and liberals are crowing for censorship, there might be a few targets on the right that are censored, but they mostly always come after the left.”

AG: Twitter was the first place I heard that Biden was bombing Syria again, and that's where many people pick up breaking news.

But what I was impressed with in what you said was that Google actually talked to you. I don't know anyone who's had any success contesting a suspension. Even if you haven't had success, they at least talk to you and you have a record of the exchange.

MH: I did not. Nolan had a hard time getting a hold of anybody over at the Alphabet-Google-YouTube conglomerate. Alan Macleod was actually able to get in touch with somebody over there. We don't know who, but it was at least a person. And again, that person basically feigned ignorance.

We've written about a lawsuit against Google, YouTube in particular, because they were deplatforming lesbian and gay channels. And when asked and confronted about it by the people who control these LGBTQ channels, the person at YouTube who spoke with them said we don't censor content that way. But then that person, interestingly, admitted that their algorithms do. So no person was doing it, but someone programmed the algorithms and the algorithms tagged some of these channels, and they were disappeared with little recourse.

And so they were trying to go through a lawsuit and in the findings, hopefully, they were going to come up with this information: who programmed the algorithms. I haven't heard what the update on that legal case is right now. It was supposed to be happening last summer. But I think like most things, COVID may have pushed it to the backburner. I intend to have that attorney back on the Project Censored show, hopefully next month, for an update.

These private, for-profit Big Tech companies all got started with public money. Don't forget that they all get public subsidies, and they've run amok. We need a reckoning here. We need to stop this before it becomes even more commonplace than it already is.

AG: What do you think of the call to deplatform Fox News, which seems to mean getting the cable networks to remove it from what they offer.

MH: I think it's idiotic and misguided. I think censorship is not the answer to these problems. The antidote to speech that we despise or dislike is more speech to counter it. We need to learn how to agree to disagree. We need to learn how to think critically and independently. We need to learn how to keep conversations going, not shut them down. And we need to resist the urge to tribalize our own communications and silo them in social mediated landscapes.

I know that's not popular among some crowds, but if you take a look at the people crowing for censorship, they run the gamut. And it's interesting that you can have Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green basically claiming that she's the poster child for censorship, that she's being silenced. Even though if you take a look, and I read a lot of conservative news sites, and they're all concerned about this, but they think it's only a problem of the “liberal” Big Tech companies, censoring them, which is laughable. I counter these people with even more examples of people on the progressive left or further left getting marginalized and getting deplatformed, and they don't want to hear it.

“We need to learn how to keep conversations going, not shut them down.”

This is about Big Tech being able to decide which voices are heard, and nobody appointed Zuckerberg or Dorsey as the czar of information, right? If we have a first amendment and it means anything, it needs to extend from government to how these Big Tech companies are basically run by proxy in the public sphere. And that needs to be challenged. So, no, as much as I may dislike and disagree with certain things that happen at Fox News, I'm not wasting my energy calling to deplatform or censor other voices. I try to spend my energy getting people to learn how to communicate more clearly and effectively together and opposing censorship in its many guises.

AG: Would you say you're a free speech absolutist?

MH: I'm not an absolutist about anything except not being an absolutist. I have nuanced views, and I don't really need to be pigeonholed that way.

There are already laws on the books that restrict certain things. There are limitations to free speech. Even if hate speech is a gray or nebulous area, it is an area. Inciting violence is not protected. Speech victimizing people and calling for acts of violence against people is not acceptable or lawful communication.

So I don't think we need more laws. I think we need more decent people in power who are able to apply these rules and extend them legislatively to the private sector. I do not think that YouTube or Twitter or Instagram, none of these companies, should be allowed to censor on the basis of content. If someone is breaking the law and they are speaking and communicating in a way that violates existing laws, they should be prosecuted. But this isn't something that should be done willy-nilly in backrooms by CEOs and their investors.

AG: All the Big Tech companies have become so married to the national security state that they might as well acknowledge that it's the public sphere.

MH: That's the point. That's exactly the point. And that is where we should focus more of our attention. I do realize that, when I speak this way, it may appear that I'm a free speech absolutist, but I acknowledge fully that there are clear restrictions to things that people should not necessarily be allowed to say. And those are things where people are inciting violence or leading to things that cause people direct harm.

And again, we already have rules for these things. Their application just needs to be extended to these Big Tech systems in place while vigorously defending other forms of legally protected speech. My good colleague, Andy Lee Roth, is writing a piece on the new gatekeepers and the algorithmic gatekeepers. So maybe you'll want to have Andy Lee Roth and Nolan Higdon on a future program.

Polina Vasiliev: Mickey, I’d like to ask about censorship and COVID-19. We're being told that that science rules and that we're supposed to protect scientific consensus, but that changes every week. And when we speak out, let's say about something that is not in agreement with the CDC currently or the WHO, the algorithms do their thing to us. What do you think about that?

MH: I think it's ridiculous. And it's another form of censorship. I see it as quite pernicious and insidious. I know that these are controversial issues. Alan Macleod, again at Mint Press News, just experienced this with a piece that he wrote about Bill Gates. He wrote a piece about Bill Gates and vaccine rollouts and what the profits were behind it, who was benefiting and which groups were being left in the lurch. And that piece was demonetized. So algorithmically, he was targeted that way because he was using key terms, but the algorithms aren't real people and don't bother to read the context of the article. So they don't even understand what he's saying.

You know, similarly, and I know that this isn't popular at Pacifica Radio, but Robert Kennedy's Children's Health Defense is a resource that uses government documents, CDC documents, WHO documents, public health documents, and peer reviewed research that have been published to argue about how we can make medical treatments and vaccines safer. They get called anti-vaxxers and flat earthers, which is a propaganda campaign.

Kennedy himself is not against vaccines. He is for vaccine safety. That there are some people that will glom onto that and make it sound like he's saying something that he isn't is part of the problem of our propaganda system and a lack of critical thinking and discourse. And it's a lack of tolerance to not have these open discussions.

Science isn't a thing, like scientism. It's not something to be worshipped. Scientific methodology is just that. It's a method of constantly questioning, constantly looking at evidence and reforming the way we see the world based on transparently sourced evidence. And we can't do that process if we have people and we have powerful institutions to shut down people that ask legitimate questions.

And I want to be very careful with this because there is a certain way that legitimacy can be established by transparently sourcing the nature of the questions. And I think that we see that among some people in our society. Are there other people that, you know, use this opportunity to wildly speculate and cast aspersions and say things that are not proven? Yes. Is that a problem? Yes, but we have to be very careful about how we get to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't in the public sphere, because often, especially in terms of scientific advancement, it's people who are saying very wildly unpopular things that history proves later to be true or to be right, or to be more accurate than they were given credit for at the time. And I think that's what it means to respect the scientific methodological process.

“We have to be very careful about how we get to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't in the public sphere.”

I'm sure listeners out there are going to be calling the stations, complaining that I'm an anti-vax person or something else, just because I have the temerity to talk about this in an open way. But I think that there are a lot of other people who share this opinion but are just too afraid to talk about it because they get tagged very quickly with negative labels. Part of the problem is that our public discourse lacks critical thought. It lacks critical assessment. And it also lacks compassion for people who have different views and different beliefs. That's a real crisis for us as the human species. And so I would hope that we'd be able to develop a communication system that does allow for reasons and questioning and challenges, but at the same time also acknowledges when there is a consensus around certain topics. One that always leaves the door open for future possibilities.

I was one of the first people to support Mark Crispin Miller's academic freedom case at NYU. Not necessarily because I agree with everything Mark says or thinks, but because academic freedom is deeply connected to freedom of expression, free speech and freedom of the press. When we really get into the weeds and start trying to micromanage the kinds of questions people ask in the classroom, and conflate it with opinions they may have out of the classroom, I think we're on a slippery slope toward a more techno-fascist and totalitarian society.

I use the term techno-fascism purposely because I think that there is a degree, a shaded degree, of that actually happening among these major tech overlords to try to curate discussion and debate, particularly in ways that go against the capitalist system. And anybody who wants to pretend like Big Pharma isn't deeply interconnected to the capitalist system probably needs to be checked out for being disconnected with reality.

So I think that there is room to ask legitimate questions without making blanket statements that all vaccines are bad and all the vaccines are good and so forth. And my experience with these movements has been very nuanced. For example, in California, a vast majority, nine of 10, who opposed State Senate Bill 277 for mandatory vaccination connected to public education were only opposed to the mandatory element because they wanted to confirm with their physicians what was best for their families. And nine of the 10 people who opposed that legislation actually were pro-vaccine and had their children vaccinated with the exception of one or two CDC-scheduled shots that they delayed or postponed because of personal health issues. You don't see that kind of nuanced reporting in the corporate press because they're beholden to Big Pharma interests. And because nuance doesn't sell. It's not sexy.

“Anybody who wants to pretend like Big Pharma isn't deeply interconnected to the capitalist system probably needs to be checked out for being disconnected with reality.”

The news media has done a horrible job of dividing the country by splitting people into factions. And it doesn't need to be that way. And I think that education can go a long way to change people's minds. And I don't mean propaganda, I mean further exposing people to transparently sourced facts as evidence for certain positions. And I think it's also important to remember that we should be very careful about demonizing other people's intentions. Most people really do have good intentions or are well-intentioned about the things that they're putting forward. And if we close down avenues of communication, we don't really get an even or fair opportunity to change each others' minds. And we don't get an opportunity to think more critically about ourselves and our own positions in the world. Again, I know people reading and listening to this may turn this around and claim any number of things that they think about me, but I would challenge them to invite me to a public conversation about it, to find out what I actually think about it so that they don't twist and turn it into something for their own agendas.

AG: Okay, listeners and readers: Don’t cancel Mickey Huff.

MH: Thanks for that.

AG: Thank you for speaking to “Covid, Race, and Democracy.”

MH: Thank you for having me.

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