Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 22, 2022 2:24 pm

NED SQUANDERS MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON ANTI-RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA IN UKRAINE
Feb 21, 2022 , 3:35 p.m.

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Anti-Russian propaganda has become one of the main weapons of the West against Russia. This is particularly special in Ukraine, as millions of dollars have been spent over the last decade to create propaganda centers and support pro-Western media and political parties that attempt to distort the role and place of the Russian nation in contemporary history.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is one of the main sources of resources for carrying out information campaigns aimed at creating a hostile image of Russia. Although this is not a reason for surprise for those of us who already know the participation of that character in previous chapters of foreign interference in Cuba , Nicaragua , and of course in our own country, Venezuela , it is always good to review the operations carried out to create instability in countries not aligned with the imperial interests of the United States.

US SPENDING TO COUNTER RUSSIA

It is a known fact that the United States is using Ukraine as a weapon in its information war against Russia. What nobody has thought about yet is the amount of money that Kiev receives from Washington in exchange for anti-Russian propaganda.

Journalist Alan Macleod of the US portal MintPress News writes that the US government has spent $22 million to wage an information war against Russia in Ukraine and abroad.

According to the journalist, the NED "is doing everything but what it claims to do [engaging in democracy promotion]. Unless the word democracy in its understanding is synonymous with the phrase 'the interests of the American elite,'" he says. Article.

Specifically, the fund has spent 22.4 million dollars on operations within Ukraine since 2014. As a curious fact, something that the article points out should be emphasized: of the European nations financed by the NED, only Russia surpasses Ukraine in resources received, with 37.7 million dollars.

The money was used to "create and form pro-Western political parties, finance controlled media outlets, subsidize large-scale privatization campaigns benefiting foreign multinational companies."

Among the controlled media, Macleod cites Ukraine's Crisis Media Center, which constantly publishes investigations into "Russia's distortion efforts" and fear-mongering about an impending Russian invasion, and invites the British ambassador to speak in your headquarters.

This center promotes a vision of Ukraine as "an outpost of freedom and democratic development in Eastern Europe" and "an integral part of the West". Two other focuses of attention of the NED projects are the Donbás and the fight against corruption.

*The word "Dombás" (or Donbass) is mentioned 52 times in NED grants to Ukraine; "eastern Ukraine" is mentioned 108 times and "Crimea" 22 times. Ambiguous phrases are used to explain the objective of the projects that receive the resource: they name the expansion of the reach of the media in those regions bordering Russia, and the aid to "civilian groups" that operate there.

*The word "corruption" appears 83 times in NED grants to Ukraine, and the foundation has funded a wide range of NGOs working on the issue.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO SEE THAT TIMES ARE CHANGING

The US government is willing to spend a huge amount of money to train Russophobes, spread false information and discredit Russia in the eyes of the international public, using satellite states to further their own interests. But the facts are showing that Washington can do nothing to isolate Russia economically or politically. By paying Ukrainians to conduct anti-Russian activities, you are simply wasting millions of dollars.

The sufficiency, almost autarkic, of Russia in the economic and political aspect proves it.

It seems that one of the goals of this US operation is to divert attention from its own problems, of which there are many, as well as to insist on plans to revive Washington's rapidly losing dominance in the world. However, today, even with massive and targeted information and propaganda pressure, it is becoming more and more difficult to deceive public opinion.

The memory of the many past deceptions of most of these propagandists is still fresh.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... en-ucrania

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 23, 2022 3:47 pm

A century of lies for war, about Russia
February 23, 2022 Stephen Millies

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“Remember the Maine!” newspaper lies were used to launch a war.

Before the planes can drop the bombs, capitalist newspapers and TV networks have to spread the lies. In 1898, U.S. banksters wanted to grab Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.

They used the explosion aboard the battleship USS Maine while it was docked in Havana to do so. Two hundred sixty sailors were killed. From coast-to-coast, newspapers ran headlines proclaiming “Remember the Maine!”

Within 10 weeks Congress declared war on Spain. Not until 1976 did U.S. Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover, as the head of an official inquiry, admit that the explosion was accidental and that Spain wasn’t responsible. Puerto Rico is still a U.S. colony.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson claimed Vietnamese PT boats attacked the U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. This big lie was the excuse to step up bombing of Vietnam and Laos. Millions of people were killed in that dirty war, including 58,000 GIs.

Who can forget George W. Bush’s Big Lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people whose family members were killed certainly can’t.

Now President Biden says that he’s convinced that the Russian Federation will invade Ukraine. He wasn’t talking about Russian Federation troops protecting people in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics from intense shelling by Ukraine.

Biden was predicting a full-scale invasion despite Russian denials. To pump up this war crisis, the New York Times and other media outlets are alleging that Russia has prepared lists of Ukrainians to kill. This is pure war propaganda.

Maybe the Times was confusing Ukraine with Indonesia, where in 1965 the CIA prepared lists of communists to be murdered. This helped the Indonesian military leaders to slaughter a million communists, trade unionists and peasant organizers.

Like Indonesia, the Ukrainian government has outlawed Communist organizations. It even banned the singing of the revolutionary anthem “The Internationale,” which was written to commemorate the Paris Commune. What sort of democracy is that?

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Lying in order to invade Russia

It’s not new for the New York Times to lie about Russia. “Documents prove Lenine and Trotzky hired by Germans” was the New York Times’ front-page headline on Sept. 15, 1918.

The sensational article — first of a series — claimed Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky were “German agents” and “the Bolshevist revolution was arranged for by the German Great General Staff.”

According to the Times, the millions of people from dozens of nationalities that rose up in a socialist revolution, was just a conspiracy hatched by the German Kaiser. This is like John Birch Society members who claim the Black Lives Matter movement or the French Revolution are and were the result of conspiracies.

The 1918 Big Lie was based on 70 documents provided by U.S. government agent Edgar Sisson. The problem was the “Sisson Documents,” supposedly originating from different locations, were almost all typed on the same manual typewriter.

It was an obvious fraud that swiftly boomeranged. In the 1950s, retired U.S. Ambassador George Kennan — himself a Cold War architect — pronounced them forgeries.

Yet this fake news was used by President Woodrow Wilson to justify sending troops to occupy Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok in revolutionary Russia. That didn’t stop Seattle dock workers from smashing crates of rifles going to former Czarist Admiral Kolchak, who threw suspected Bolsheviks into the boilers of steam locomotives.

Black Liberation fighters including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones and Paul Robeson were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution.

Less than two months after the “Sisson Documents” were published, German workers and sailors, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, overthrew the Kaiser.

Triumph and defeat

The Soviet Union that resulted from the Bolshevik Revolution lifted up people from more than 100 nationalities. They established the world’s first and largest affirmative action programs that fought for equality.

Ukraine is a good example. Between 1915 and 1965, the number of students in Ukraine more than tripled to reach 8.5 million. In the same period the number of college students increased twenty times. (“National Languages in the USSR: Problems and Solutions” by M. I. Isayev.)

These students were taught primarily in Ukrainian. Compare that to the mission schools in the United States and Canada where Indigenous youth were beaten if they spoke their own languages. Many died.

Never forget that 27 million Soviet people, including millions of Ukrainians, died defeating Hitler. It was the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945. One of the sheroes was the Ukrainian woman sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko who killed 309 Nazis.

Tragically the Soviet Union was overthrown 30 years ago. Like Reconstruction’s bloody overthrow by the Ku Klux Klan, it was a defeat for all poor and working people.

While monuments to Confederate slave masters have been toppled by the Black Lives Matter movement, thousands of statues of revolutionaries and Red Army leaders have been destroyed in Ukraine. Meanwhile statues of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, whose followers slaughtered thousands of Jewish and Polish people, have been erected.

Eighty-one million people voted against Trump and racism in 2020. They didn’t vote for a war against the Russian Federation.

Our enemies are the landlords who are jacking-up rents by as much as 40%. President Biden isn’t able to defend voting rights but he’s threatening a new dangerous armed conflict with nuclear-armed Russia.

Hands off the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and the Russian Federation!

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ut-russia/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 24, 2022 2:56 pm

Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine
JOHN MCEVOY

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BBC image of a young boy receiving weapons training from a neo-Nazi brigade

When the corporate media push for war, one of their main weapons is propaganda by omission.

In the case of the recent crisis in Ukraine, Western journalists have omitted key context about the expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War, as well as US support for the Maidan coup in 2014 (FAIR.org, 1/28/22).

A third and crucial case of propaganda by omission relates to the integration of neo-Nazis into the Ukrainian armed forces (FAIR.org, 3/7/14, 1/28/22). If the corporate media reported more critically about Western support for the neo-Nazi-infested Ukrainian security services, and how these forces function as a front-line proxy of US foreign policy, public support for war might be reduced and military budgets called into greater question.

As recent coverage demonstrates, one way of resolving this issue is by not mentioning the inconvenient matter of Ukrainian neo-Nazis altogether.

The Azov Battalion
MSNBC: Growing Threat of Ukraine Invasion
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The Azov Battalion’s Nazi-inspired logo can be seen in an MSNBC segment (2/14/22).
In 2014, the Azov Battalion was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU) to assist with fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

At the time, the militia’s association with neo-Nazism was well documented: The unit used the Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel symbol as its logo, while its soldiers sported Nazi insignia on their combat helmets. In 2010, the Azov Battalion’s founder declared that Ukraine should “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

The Azov Battalion is now an official regiment of the NGU, and operates under the authority of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

‘A granny with a gun’
London Times: Leaders in Final Push to Avert Ukraine Invasion
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Pointing out that people training the 79-year-old woman to use an assault weapon (London Times, 2/13/22) were members of a fascist force would have spoiled the heart-warming aspect of the image.
In mid-February 2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, the Azov Battalion organized a military training course for Ukrainian civilians in the port city of Mariupol.

Images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47, soon featured across the Western broadcast and print media.

The figure of a pensioner lining up to protect her homeland made for an emotive image, collapsing the conflict into a simple good versus evil binary, while adding weight to US and British intelligence assessments forecasting an immediate full-scale Russian invasion.

Such a narrative was not to be ruined by reference to the neo-Nazi group training her. Indeed, mention of the Azov Battalion was largely erased from mainstream coverage of the event.

The BBC (2/13/22), for instance, showed a clip of “civilians lining up for a few hours’ military training with the National Guard,” with International Correspondent Orla Guerin describing Konstantynovska endearingly as “a granny with a gun.” Though Azov Battalion insignia was visible in the report, Guerin made no reference to it, and the report ends perversely with an NGU combatant helping a child to load an ammunition magazine.

The BBC (12/13/14) has not always been so reluctant to discuss the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism. In 2014, the broadcaster noted that its leader “considers Jews and other minorities ‘sub-human’ and calls for a white, Christian crusade against them,” while it “sports three Nazi symbols on its insignia.”

Both MSNBC (2/14/22) and ABC News (2/13/22) also reported from Mariupol, showing similar video footage of an Azov Battalion member teaching Konstantynovska to use a rifle. As with the BBC, no mention was made of the regiment’s far right association.

Sky News updated its initial report (2/13/22) to include mention of the “far right” trainers (2/14/22), while Euronews (2/13/22) made a rare mention of the Azov Battalion in its initial coverage.

‘Glorification of Nazism’
Telegraph: Ukraine Crisis: The Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-Russian Separatists
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There was a time when Western news outlets (Daily Telegraph, 8/11/14) recognized the Azov Battalion as a neo-Nazi force rather than a source of photo ops.
The printed press fared little better. On February 13, UK newspapers the London Times and the Daily Telegraph ran front-page spreads showing Konstantynovska preparing her weapon, without any reference to the Azov Battalion running the training course.

Worse still, both the Times and the Daily Telegraph had already reported on the militia’s neo-Nazi associations. In September 2014, the Times described the Azov Battalion as “a group of heavily armed men” with “at least one sporting a Nazi logo…preparing for the defense of Mariupol,” adding that the group had been “formed by a white supremacist.” For its part, the Daily Telegraph described the battalion in 2014 as “the neo-Nazi brigade fighting pro-Russian separatists.”

In light of NATO’s recent posturing in defense of Ukraine, the fact of the Azov Battalion’s neo-Nazism seems to have become an inconvenience.

On December 16, 2021, only the US and Ukraine voted against a United Nations resolution condemning the “glorification of Nazism,” while the United Kingdom and Canada abstained. There can be little doubt that this decision was made with the conflict in Ukraine in mind.

In the doctrine of Western militarism, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And if that friend happens to enlist neo-Nazis, Western corporate media can be relied on to look the other way.

https://fair.org/home/western-media-fal ... n-ukraine/

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 25, 2022 2:34 pm

FEBRUARY 24, 2022
In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’
CounterSpin interview with Bryce Greene on Ukraine
JANINE JACKSON
In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’


Janine Jackson interviewed Bryce Greene about Ukraine for the February 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.


WaPo: The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene
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Washington Post (4/7/14)
Janine Jackson: Many Americans are confused or just unknowledgeable about Ukraine. They couldn’t find it on a map. A 2014 Washington Post story noted that the less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want the US to intervene.

Well, into that void have rushed corporate news media, telling us for weeks now that there is a threat—presumably to us—over there, and we need to get ready for war. The ease with which media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might need to be sent off to a violent death in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. US officials accusing journalists who ask basic evidentiary questions of consorting with the enemy—should be disturbing.

The very fact that news media have a framework in which there are enemies whose actions don’t merit thoughtful consideration, and a US “us” whose actions are always good, all of this should disturb you—not just about foreign policy, but about the power of news media to amp people up to accept horrific, avoidable actions.

The current crisis with the US and Russia about Ukraine is a test of many things, not least news media’s ability and willingness to disengage themselves from these frozen narratives, from uncritical parroting of official sources, and from the devastating idea that diplomacy is weakness, and massive violence, or threats of massive violence, are the best way to address conflict.

Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. He joins us now by phone from Indianapolis. Welcome to CounterSpin, Bryce Greene.

Bryce Greene: Thanks for having me on. I’m happy to be here.
FAIR: What You Should Really Know About Ukraine
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FAIR.org (1/28/22)
JJ: Your straightforward piece, an explainer about explainers, got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org. People needed it. And I’m just going to ask you to talk us through the official line on Ukraine, and the questions that we should have about it. Because all of the elements—Russians as cartoons; the US, as ever, engaged in democracy promotion; oh, are there material interests there? How dare you suggest!— It’s all so dusty, this playbook, you know?

And part of what feels so dated about it is that it’s about NATO. I know for a fact that listeners under, like, heck, 40 years old are like, well, I’ve heard the word NATO, but whaat? You know, why? Isn’t the Cold War over? And yet NATO, and what it represents in 2022, are at the core here. So just start us off wherever you would like to, in terms of helping people understand what’s actually going on right now.

BG: Right, so most media outlets try to put the current escalation in context. And when they do, they usually start at one event, the 2014 annexation of Crimea. And they use this to demonstrate how Russia has imperial ambitions to reconquer the old Soviet territories and reestablish the old Soviet Union.

But for that to have any real credibility, you need to ignore what happened right before 2014, what happened right before the Donbas uprising, what happened before Russia began backing the separatist rebels.

And that takes you back to early 2014, when the US government helped violently oust the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in what was called the Maidan Coup. After he fled the country, the new government immediately established closer ties to Europe and the US, and turned away from Putin’s Russia.

Now, understanding why and how we did that is key to understanding Putin’s actions today. Like, if the United States had a neighbor who recently had a government change, instigated in part by Russia, and then that country tried to join a hostile military alliance, I think the US would be rightly concerned. They’d lose their minds. But you don’t really see that same concern extended to what’s going on over there in Ukraine.

So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.

But unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And, you know, they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance one country at a time.

And even at the time, Cold Warriors like the famed diplomat George Kennan warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world.

But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway. In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime change interests in the name of “democracy.”

Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.

Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world. So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.

And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.
BBC: Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call
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BBC (2/7/14)
So at this point, I want listeners to ask themselves, what if Russia were sending high-level government officials to anti-government protests in Canada or Mexico? What if one of Putin’s advisors right now went to go encourage the trucker protests in Canada, and said that they should get rid of their kind of government? We’d lose our minds. And rightfully so. That’s just ridiculous. And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors—

JJ: Right.

BG: —and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.

Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.

So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen. And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia—

JJ: Right.

BG: They revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely. The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russian sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.

And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.

JJ: Right.

BG: And when Russia started building up troops on the border, the United States started saying, hey, they’re about to attack. Of course, they didn’t have any evidence for that. The Russians had built up troops on the border in similar numbers in the past without a similar panic.

JJ: Right.

BG: But this time there was a lot of panic. So at this point the US media starts saying that, yes, this is Russia; they’re building up to invade Ukraine. They’re similar to Hitler or some other dictator that’s violating national sovereignty. And so now you have the US sending millions and millions and millions of dollars in weapons. They’re claiming that an invasion is imminent. There was this strange thing from the State Department about the Russians planning a false flag attack to justify an invasion. Of course, the State Department didn’t provide any evidence of that.

JJ: And in fact, a reporter, Matt Lee of AP, pushed back on that, famously.

BG: Yeah. Like a normal person should. Then Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, accused him of being pro-Russia, or consorting with the enemy. It was really ridiculous.

But those are the roots of this entire escalation, this situation, these heightened tensions. And all of that is completely omitted from the Western media. How can you talk about the current situation without talking about the past? How can you understand Russia’s actions without understanding how the United States might have provoked them? And yet you have pundits all over the place asking, what does Putin want? Who knows if Putin’s going to invade? Or on another end is, like, Putin won’t stop with Ukraine. He’ll keep going. His goal is to reestablish the Soviet Union, or the Russian empire. And this is all ridiculous.

From the start, Putin has been clear that he does not want NATO to expand, that he does not want missiles stationed just across his border. He doesn’t want troops there. He doesn’t want those problems on his border. But that doesn’t seem to be something that the United States media can understand. In fact, when Putin sent a proposal to Biden, talking about NATO, talking about the weapons, talking about the missiles, the media described these as non-starters.

JJ: Mmhm.

BG: As if asking for missiles not to be pointed at you at, point blank range, is out of the question to ask. Putin should accept that there will be a bunch of missiles, there will be a bunch of soldiers and military bases, all pointed at him. And that doesn’t square. Imagine, again, if the US were being asked to tolerate missiles pointed at us in Mexico or Canada. Again, we would go crazy.

JJ: Well, US exceptionalism is part of the price of admission to serious news media conversation. You’re supposed to accept that the US has the right to intervene anywhere, anytime. If we’re going to talk about who owes who what, or the US, James Baker, made a commitment about NATO and its reach, and somehow that’s also off the page.
WaPo: Putin’s fight with Ukraine reflects his deep distrust of the West. There’s a long history behind that.
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Washington Post (12/1/21)
BG: It’s sometimes discussed in media. Like, there was a Washington Post article, and they interviewed Mary Sarotte. And she wrote one of the major books talking about this promise not to expand to the east, and she said, straight up, Washington got greedy, and that destabilized the region. That was just one interview in a sea of the official line, in a sea of opinions and articles talking about how Vladimir Putin wants to expand the Soviet empire. Just having one article in the midst of all the noise, it doesn’t really do much to cut through.

So it is admitted by the media, but it isn’t really addressed. They don’t take it into account when they do their analyses. And that reflects a major American exceptionalist bias.

JJ: Let me just say, polls, despite the media onslaught, despite corporate media slipping so easily into saber-rattling mode—it’s just so unsettling to see the ease with which news media go back into yeah, them, they’re horrible. Yes, us, we’re great, and surely killing is the answer. Despite all of that, and despite disinformation, polls are still showing that people in the US don’t want a war with Russia. Apparently Russian polls show that Russian people don’t want a war. People understand the harms of these things that pundits are blithely tossing about.

BG: Mmhm.

JJ: And so I just want to ask you, there are other voices. There are other ideas about how to go forward. Can you just talk about other avenues, what diplomacy might look like, what media that take diplomacy seriously might look like, or might include or exclude?

BG: Part of the stalemate between the eastern Donbas rebels and the Ukrainian government, part of that was started because they agreed to a ceasefire in something called the Minsk II agreement.

JJ: Right.

BG: The Minsk agreements were an arrangement where the Ukraine would provide a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region, and Russia would withdraw all of its volunteers and troops. The area would be sort of demilitarized, and then there would be elections in that region and some sort of special status for that region afterwards.

Well, Ukraine has refused to implement it, and Washington and the rest of the European Union, they don’t really push Ukraine on this. There are a lot of reasons for that; mainly one of them is because they don’t think that they would be able to join NATO if they had a region of their country that isn’t fully controlled by the country. And so there’s been sort of a stagnation there.

But there’s been a lot of people, analysts, who are talking about restarting these Minsk II agreements, talking about how can we get to a point where we’re talking about it again, and implementing it and maybe reimagining it for a more recent time, a more modern time? But those voices are very rarely included in the mainstream media. People talk about negotiations, and then they talk about all the “non-starters” that Putin’s offering, but they don’t talk about the framework for diplomacy that already exists.
Nation: Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World
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The Nation (11/15/21)
One of the best commentators is Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He writes very clearly. He had a very good article in The Nation about the Minsk II agreements. And there are some in the media who do take his voice and amplify it. He was on Mehdi Hasan’s show on MSNBC, one of the only decent people on MSNBC.

JJ: Right.

BG: And then I think he was interviewed once on NPR. But beyond that, no one hears about that. No one hears that there is a diplomatic solution that can apply to the situation. And so the result is that people are scared that, OK, there’s going to be a war. And the only off-ramp seems to be non-starters.

JJ: And it’s disheartening, in the sense that people who, I’m talking about US citizens, they really don’t have a beef with Ukraine. They don’t know what’s going on in Ukraine. They are only looking at news media for their cues —

BG: Mmhm.

JJ: —of what to understand and how to feel. And we didn’t even get started on if you learn more about Ukrainian movements and what they’re about, would those be the team that you would back, you know?

BG: Right, right.

JJ: That’s a whole other story, yeah?

BG: Yeah. So part of the opposition that helped topple the government in 2014 were made up of the far right. And I know we in America throw around the term “Nazi.” Sometimes it applies, sometimes it doesn’t.

JJ: Mmhm.

BG: Here, in this case, it absolutely applies. These are open Nazis flying Nazi symbols, Nazi flags, doing Nazi salutes, and they have an ethnic purity idea about why they’re opposed to Russia.

And so the United States utilized these people to help overthrow the government. There was a lot of violence around the time of the overthrow. Some of these Nazis, they actually gathered a bunch of protestors in a building, locked the doors, and set the building on fire, killing dozens. But none of this is talked about when we talk about the current situation.

And part of those far-right groups, part of those far-right militias, they were integrated into the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian National Guard. And this is the same national guard that the US has given about $2.5 billion. And we don’t talk about it.

Congress did have a provision that restricted aid to this specific sector of the Ukrainian military. But there was a report from, I think, the Daily Beast that said that there really is no mechanism for enforcing that. Like, it’s on paper, but it’s not in practice. And so the United States is actively funding Nazi militias. That’s just a fact.

And, in fact, recently there was a picture of an old woman holding an AK-47 in a training session. And it was used in Western media to show that the Ukrainian people are ready to defend their homeland. Well, people did some digging on the ground, and it turns out that this was a public relations event staged by these Nazis, by the Azov Battalion. But no one reported that in Western media. In fact, I think it was Richard Engel of NBC, I believe, who tweeted a picture of it. People called him out, they said, hey, these are Nazi people. There was actually a Nazi patch visible in the footage that was used on TV. No accountability.

JJ: No.

BG: No accountability, no one is forced to say, oops, sorry, I didn’t mean to spread Nazi propaganda to Western audiences.

JJ: Right.

BG: No one is saying that. But that’s US media for you. You see it in Czech press, in Irish press, and all over the world. They’re like, yeah, these were straight-up Nazis, this was a Nazi event. And the US media can’t seem to grasp this.

JJ: I’ll just finish up where we started, because I know that listeners are uninformed, and almost ashamed of being uninformed, about what’s going on, as is often the case in foreign policy. And then they’re relying on US media to tell them which side they’re on, and to explain the interest. And just in a final minute or so, somebody’s picking up a paper, looking at Ukraine. What are some questions that you would just say, keep this in your mind as you read this coverage? ‘Cause it’s not done. It’s not done, you know; it’s going forward.

BG: Mmhm.

JJ: What should we keep in mind as we look at media coverage, going forward from today?

BG: One of the biggest questions that I ask myself whenever I’m reading a piece like this, aside from taking history into account, which is important, but you should also ask yourself, who are the sources being utilized in this story? Very often you’ll see a story that says “according to US intelligence” or “according to this State Department official” or “according to someone in the government.” Like, official sources. Well, if you look at the history of US media and US government public relations, there’s a well-documented and very extensive history of the government lying to the public. The classic example, WMD.

JJ: Yeah.

BG: WMD, for many people, destroyed the credibility of the media, because they credibly took government statements at face value. They didn’t question them. They didn’t seek out alternative explanations. They didn’t challenge the government when they said what they said. And so that’s sort of what they’re doing here. Repeatedly, you’re seeing stories about intelligence officials who say that an invasion is imminent without providing any evidence.

And so you have to take intelligence and official government sources with a grain of salt. When an intelligence agency says that Russia is going to invade, well, the only information you have is that an intelligence agency wants you to believe that Russians are going to invade, regardless of whether or not they are going to. And so that’s one filter that might help cut through the noise when reading the media.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Bryce Greene. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” appeared recently on FAIR.org. Bryce Greene, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BG: I’m very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

https://fair.org/home/in-ukraine-no-one ... -solution/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 26, 2022 3:12 pm

Facebook is reversing its ban on posts praising Ukraine's far-right Azov Battalion, report says
Urooba Jamal 24 hours ago

Image
Azov Regiment veterans hold the territorial defence drill for civilians. Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Getty Images

Facebook is backtracking on its ban on praise for Ukraine's far-right armed forces.
Posts praising their role in defending Ukraine or being in Ukraine's National Guard will be allowed.
The company will continue to ban hate speech and hate symbolism, a Meta spokesperson told Insider.


Facebook is backtracking on a ban it placed on users praising the Azov Battalion, a far-right paramilitary force within the Ukrainian National Guard.

The Intercept first reported the news.

Praise for the group, which is the armed wing of the country's white nationalist Azov movement, was banned in 2019 under Facebook's Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy. The platform had classified the group alongside others such as the Ku Klux Klan and Islamic State.

A 2016 report by the OHCHR found that Azov soldiers had raped and tortured civilians during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine.


The memos seen by The Intercept, however, also acknowledge the group's ideology, and listed the following post as an example of unacceptable content, according to the outlet: "Well done Azov for protecting Ukraine and it's white nationalist heritage."

The battalion itself will still be banned from using Facebook to publish posts or recruit members, while images of its uniform and banners will still be banned as hate symbols.

"For the time being, we are making a narrow exception for praise of the Azov Regiment strictly in the context of defending Ukraine, or in their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard," a spokesperson from Facebook's parent company, Meta, told Insider.

"But we are continuing to ban all hate speech, hate symbolism, praise of violence, generic praise, support, or representation of the Azov Regiment, and any other content that violates our community standards," it added.


The spokesperson explained that the decision would allow Facebook users to obtain information about the forces' military activity, including their safety, whereabouts. and the severity of their military operations.

The policy shift has also been set in place to ensure that news coverage of the conflict can continue to be shared on the platform, the spokesperson said.

The paramilitary forces began as a volunteer anti-Russia militia who joined the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014. They garnered support from many Ukrainians when, that year, they fought Russia's army and separatist proxy forces from taking Mariupol, an eastern port city, BuzzFeed reported.

The group, which boasts thousands of members alongside hundreds of armed fighters, is overt about its ideology.


In 2010, Andriy Biletsky, its first commander who was also a former parliamentarian, said Ukraine is meant to "lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen (subhumans)", The Guardian reported in 2018.

Some of its soldiers also wear symbols of the Third Reich and have forged links with the alt-right and neo-Nazis in the US.

Content moderation expert Dia Kayyali told The Intercept that Facebook's move was "nonsensical."

She said: "Their assessments of what is a dangerous organization should always be contextual; there shouldn't be some special carveout for a group that would otherwise fit the policy just because of a specific moment in time."


The policy shift is part of Meta's broader response to monitor content on Facebook since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine this week. This involves the creation of a special team to deal with hate speech and misinformation.

https://www.businessinsider.com/faceboo ... 022-2?IR=C

Ruling class solidarity...

Hey facebook, got some hate speech for ya:

Image

That's some 'hate' you can believe in.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 27, 2022 6:43 pm

Image

Fake News Warfare in Ukraine Conflict (+Zelensky on the Frontlines?)
February 27, 2022

The ongoing geopolitical and military conflict situation between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Ukraine is being used for fake news production by Western press and social media platforms, as is becoming evident.

Biased reports, publications of old photographs, and even simulations and video games serve as “source” for the mainstream media and social media accounts of great influence. With the publication of fake news, they are trying to show an “indignation” against war, something that was never seen against all the atrocities perpetrated or promoted by governments such as that of the United States.

In the case of the conflict in Ukraine, one of the fake news that was dismantled hours after it was broadcast consists of images of bombings and the alleged activation of anti-aircraft defense systems in Ukrainian territory. It was revealed that the bombings were from scenes of a video game called ArmA 3.


Photos, videos and stories abound in social media platforms and other digital platforms, seeking sustenance by appealing to values ​​such as tenderness, patriotism, and courage. For this reason, images associated with fear, love and the fragility of children are being disseminated.

On the other hand, some photographs of the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, dressed in a military uniform, were circulated to claim that he was in “the frontlines of battle in defense of his country.” However, those photographs were revealed to have been published in early December last year.


War against truth
Ukraine has been at war for eight years, against the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbass region that had seceded from Ukraine after the 2014 coup. Many of the images of that conflict have been manipulated to affirm that all those have been happening since February 24, when Russia’s special military operation began.

Similarly, a photo of Ukrainian boys and girls greeting Ukrainian soldiers was circulated as recent, but was later confirmed to be a photograph of an advertisement of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense that has been around for several years.

Moreover, photos and videos from other conflicts in other regions, including of wars carried out or promoted by the US in Syria, Libya and Palestine, have been presented as images from the current conflict in Ukraine.


Another such incident was that of a video where a man can be seen crying while saying goodbye to his daughter and wife. The scene was used to dramatize the farewell of a supposedly Ukrainian family, when in reality it was about a Russian man of the Donbass bidding farewell to his family that was being evacuated to Russia at the start of the Ukrainian bombing of the region days before the Russian military moved in.


Zelensky on the frontlines?

A similar incident happened with the Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky who in a speech on February 25 announced his pledge to remain in Kiev. Soon after his speech, several images with Zelensky in military uniform went viral in social media platforms, claiming that he was at the frontlines of war. One of the images got more than 33,000 shares on Facebook in just a few hours.

The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the photos to be old and not related to the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.



With the help of a reverse image search, the Indian news outlet found the originsl image posted on Getty Images. According to the description on Getty Images, the image was from Zelensky’s visit to the front-line positions of the Ukrainian military in Donbass on December 06, 2021.




Featured image: Images showing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dressed in military uniform, December 6, 2021. Photo: India Today

(RedRadioVE) by José Manuel Blanco Díaz, with Orinoco Tribune content

Translation: Orinoco Tribune


https://orinocotribune.com/fake-news-wa ... rontlines/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 28, 2022 12:37 pm

Western Reporting: News from Nowhere
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 27, 2022
Stephen Sefton

Image

Apologies to John Heartfield’s “Whoever reads bourgeois newspapers becomes blind and deaf”

There are three main senses in which practically no foreign affairs reporting by Western news media and NGOs is ever about the country ostensibly the subject of their reports. First, almost invariably the reporting is so selective and biased as to be in effect a fictional account of some notional place barely recognizable as the country in question. Secondly, any particular report is always and principally intended to serve the much larger false narrative of Western superiority and benevolence. Thirdly, the reports generally depend on some great comprehensive deceit offering false plausibility to other minor, more detailed untruths.

In Ukraine, the massive deceit has been to ignore NATO country governments’ support for a fascist regime subordinate to followers of Nazism attacking its own Ukrainian citizens since 2014 with around 14,000 deaths, tens of thousands of wounded and hundreds of thousands people displaced. Those same NATO country governments destroyed Libya and almost destroyed Syria, falsely accusing those countries’ leaders of “killing their own people”. In Latin America, the catch-all big lie is that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are incompetent brutal dictatorships, when in fact their people-focused policies put to shame the desperate social reality prevalent in the countries of US allies like Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, or Honduras.

This reality is self-evident to anyone trying to report faithfully from any of the countries targeted as enemies by the ruling elites of North America and Europe, the respective government leaders they control and too their pscychological warfare media and NGO apparatus. Western media and NGOs systematically mislead their populations about international affairs based on three fundamental presuppostions:

North American and European countries are highly morally principled
The majority world generally benefits from Western good intentions
Governments opposed to the West are bad and deserve to punished
Thus, accounts published in NATO country psychological warfare outlets like the New York Times, the Guardian, El País, Le Monde, Deutsche Welle, France 24, the BBC, CNN and so on and on, have barely anything to do with the region or country on which they feign to be reporting. Their role is to misinform Western populations about world events, criminalizing foreign governments so as to consolidate political support for North American and European crimes against the majority world. Domestically, their role is to suppress any trace of popular dissent threatening Western ruling elites’ power and control. Since at least the Iraq war, this inverse relationship has been very clear. Overseas, Western power and influence decline: at home, economic and political repression increase.

While events in Ukraine and elsewhere currently dominate global news, long standing Western aggression against smaller countries like, in Latin America, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela continues. Typical recent coverage of that aggression in the case of Nicaragua demonstrates how the negation of basic reporting integrity renders Western media and NGO accounts of foreign affairs practically worthless. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has been under comprehensive assault from Western media and NGOs ever since taking office in January 2007.

Its president, Daniel Ortega has won election after election with massive majorities. Prior to 2018 Nicaragua stood out in the region for its achievements reducing poverty, its economic growth and its political and social stability. Unable to win power with popular support via elections, the US and EU funded opposition promoted a failed coup attempt in 2018 during which opposition militants and thugs with firearms burned down public buildings, businesses and private homes and even preschools. They killed over 20 police officers wounding 400 officers.

They installed roadblocks as bases from which to terrorize local people, demanding money, searching and stealing people’s personal effects, assaulting government supporters, abusing women and girls.Those responsible for organizing that violent failed coup attempt tried to repeat it around last year’s elections. Before they could do so they were arrested and put on trial. As usual, reporting of this reality by Western media, NGOs and institutions inverted what happened, casting the traitorous opposition criminals as innocent and peaceful while portraying the Nicaraguan government as brutal and illegitimate. That mendacious inversion has facilitated every kind of false account of subsequent events.

So, for example, most recently, the New York Times reports the Nicaraguan authorities closure of six private universities for failing to satisfy regulatory requirements as if the government is shutting down the country’s private university sector as a whole. The NYT omits that Nicaragua has over 50 universities, the great majority of which are private and the authorities immediately set up three public universities to guarantee good quality university education for the affected students with lower fees and more scholarships. Likewise, the NYT reports that hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans now live in Costa Rica without explaining that this has been the case for decades rather than being any kind recent migratory phenomenon, as their report implies.

Practically all Western media reporting on Nicaragua deploys this kind of systematic deceit, sourcing their reports exclusively on Nicaragua’s plentiful opposition media outlets, almost all of which are funded directly or indirectly by US and allied governments. The most notorious of these outlets is Confidencial, which, despite receiving US government funding, is invariably described in Western reporting as being independent. North American and European NGOs and institutions collude in thise bad faith reporting, reinforcing the deceitful Western consensus, especially around human rights related issues.

For example, people interested in environmental or indigenous peoples’ issues will look to NGOs like the Oakland Institute or Mongabay for trustworthy reporting. Both these organizations receive large donations from corporate owned funders. The Oakland Institute has been funded by the Howard Buffet Foundation specifically to report on Nicaragua. Mongabay, although a non profit entity, is itself a corporation whose president and chief executive officer is paid US$234,000 a year. Its income reached over US$4 million in 2020 dropping to US$2.4 million the following year. Mongabay has received numerous donations of over US$100,000 from bodies like the Walton Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), for example.

The role of these NGOs reporting on Nicaragua is thoroughly dishonest. Nicaragua has the most innovative and advanced system of indigenous people’s self government anywhere. Distorting this reality, the Oakland Institute has been shown to have claimed falsely that cattle farming for beef exports was the cause of murderous conflicts on indigenous peoples lands. Likewise, Mongabay has claimed government policy in Nicaragua incites invasion of indigenous peoples’ lands despite elected indigenous peoples leaders themselves contradicting that falsehood. This kind of false reporting by media and NGOs feeds into US controlled institutions like the Organization of American States or UN human rights bodies, rendering worthless those influential institutions own reports.

Writers like Cory Morningstar and Whitney Webb have explained in detail the underlying rationale for this systematic legitimization of falsehood by Western controlled international institutions, media and NGOs.The relentless psychological warfare offensive undermines national governments, promoting the predatory corporate driven social and environmental agenda aimed at privatizing nature itself and imposing relentless digital control on all aspects of human life. Western media outlets, NGOs and institutions avow transparency and accountability but that too is a contemptible, cynical lie. Anyone challenging the false consensus is either attacked or suppressed.

Corporate NGOs like Mongabay or major institutions like the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights never engage well informed challenges publicly. In part, this clear ethical failure stems from fear of having their falsity and bad faith exposed, but linked to that is a deeply anti-democratic determination to prevent a wider public from having the chance to make up their own minds based on broadly sourced information. The test of good faith for any information is whether the reporting outlet is honest in declaring its own bias and interests and at least acknowledges competing information sources. Western foreign affairs reporting outlets almost invariably fails that test, consistently and comprehensively, reducing themselves to pathetic instruments of psychological warfare.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/02/ ... m-nowhere/

Neocolonial Psy-warfare: The Collusion of Western Media and NGOS
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JULY 25, 2016
Tortilla con Sal

Ever since the early 20th Century, managing global consumer taste in communications has been fundamental to the Western corporate elites’ success in their endless global war on the impoverished majority. But their control of global perceptions is in jeopardy now as the effects of climate change become more extreme and the Western powers face increasingly more effective challenges to their economic and military supremacy. Increasingly too, Western dominance even in the English language theater of the global psychological war is less robust now than before. Foreign media with English language outlets, like Russia’s RT, Iran’s Press TV, the ALBA countries’ Telesur or China Central TV offer fresh coverage that has effectively broken Western media’s previous monopoly of foreign news consumption.

One fundamental aspect of psychological warfare ruthlessly exploited by the corporate capitalist elites is the vulnerability of people who think of themselves as progressive to dishonest manipulation of their sincere humanitarian impulses and sense of justice. That exploitation has intensified and become more creative over the last thirty years with a mushrooming of non-governmental organizations and their increasing use as supposedly reliable sources of factual information. This is especially important in terms of managing the relatively well educated, politically articulate populations of the NATO countries in North America and Europe. To do so, Western media and NGOS collaborate more and more with self-evident but unacknowledged ideological bias and also increasingly abandon even the pretense of basic professional competence.

Just as in the West’s corporate disinformation media, the corporate management of the NGO sector works via a straightforward class mechanism that naturally screens out genuine dissidents. The various ideological filters can accommodate all kinds of nonconformists, across gender, sexuality, race, religion and class itself, but long experience has shown that peer pressure and fear of losing income or status suppress dissent very effectively. Only a tiny number of people are able to resist the subtle but crushing machinery of intellectual oppression this insidious culture imposes. And because the numbers who resist are so small, they have a correspondingly trivial impact in the West’s psychological war against the global impoverished majority.

This in its turn means that really quite diverse identities accumulate in the Western NGO sector, clustering around gender, sexuality, race, and political ideology. Those identity-focused clusters feed into and are in turn themselves to some extent shaped by the majority world NGO sector, itself mostly dependent on the corporate and government funding base of their Western counterparts. The resulting enormous global network enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Western corporate and alternative media. Western media pick up stories from NGOs so the NGOs benefit from Western media coverage in a mutual credibility-enhancing display for the benefit of gullible consumers. This kind of perception management occurs constantly in foreign news coverage of countries targeted by NATO country governments, from Venezuela to Syria to Eritrea but it takes time and effort to uncover how this psy-warfare mechanism works.

A recent example in the case of Nicaragua turns around reports of alleged killings of environmental activists in the country’s Caribbean Coast. Both the Guardian and Fox News for example ran stories based on a June 2016 report called “On Dangerous Ground” by the Global Witness NGO which alleges that 12 environmental defenders were murdered in Nicaragua in 2015. The Global Witness report cynically places these alleged murders in the same context as the murder of Berta Cáceres and of other environmental activists in Brazil, Colombia and Peru. The report’s summary introduction states, “As demand for products like timber, minerals and palm oil continues, governments, companies and criminal gangs are exploiting land with little regard for the people who live on it. Increasingly, communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers. The numbers are shocking. We documented 185 killings across16 countries, a 59% increase on 2014 and the highest annual toll on record.”

In Nicaragua’s case, what Global Witness mean by “documented” is that their team went on line, consulted several reports published in the virulently anti-Sandinista La Prensa newspaper of the views and work of one activist and her human rights organization, some links about that same activist by Front Line Defenders another Western NGO, and a recommendation for precautionary measures from the neocolonial OAS Inter American Commission for Human Rights. Following the Global Witness report, yet another Western NGO called Intercontinental Cry published an article headlined There is a crisis erupting along Nicaragua’s Northern Coast”. All these reports are deliberately framed to give the false impression that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is somehow colluding with sinister commercial interests to attack indigenous peoples and deprive them of their land. But all the relevant detail and context, all the social, economic and cultural complexity, tell a very different story.

In fact, under President Daniel Ortega, since 2007, the Sandinista government has resolutely restored and defended the communal rights of around 300 indigenous peoples’ communities with 23 communal land titles covering a population of over 200,000 people on 37,000 square kilometers, equivalent to almost 30% of Nicaragua’s national territory. Land disputes in Nicaragua are not uncommon because the Sandinista government has struggled to bring order and legitimacy to the chaotic property legacy resulting from title disputes unresolved, in many cases, since the revolutionary land reform of the 1980s. Across all of northern Nicaragua, including the northern Caribbean Coast, climate change and agricultural expansion are putting increasing pressure on natural reserves and protected areas. In recent years, that already difficult situation has been made more tense and complicated in the northern Caribbean Coast, by unscrupulous local indigenous peoples’ leaders.

In September last year, the National Assembly suspended the parliamentary status of Brooklyn Rivera, leader of the indigenous people’s movement Yatama because the government’s Attorney General alleged he and his accomplices had illegally sold communal lands to non-indigenous people. That series of illegal sales, included, among others, the communities of Awastigni, Prinzu Awala, Wangki Twi-Tasba Raya, Twi Waupasa, Wangki Li Aubra, Matumbak, covering a total territory of over 1500 square kilometers. Among the areas involved in the illegal sales are precisely the areas where non-indigenous purchasers of land have been in conflict with local indigenous people. The conflict in Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean Coast is one partly provoked and in great part aggravated by the greed of the indigenous peoples’ own corrupt leaders.

However, as usual, Western media and NGOs have colluded to omit vital context, reporting in a selective and dishonest way, giving a false account of a complicated reality completely foreign to them. They have failed to report the causes or context of the conflict in northern Nicaragua, leaving it open to their readers to conclude that Nicaragua’s Sandinista government has colluded in events of genuine concern. They also omit that Sandinista party activists have been victims of violence from Brooklyn Rivera’s Yatama political movement, the very people responsible for the illegal sale of their own communities’ lands. Despite that, Western media and their allies often give a platform to Brooklyn Rivera who continues to pose as a defender of his people. On the other hand, they have inexplicably omitted to consult the opinion of Mirna Cunningham, another historic indigenous people’s leader from Northern Nicaragua who has been president of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues since 2011.

Western NGOs and media also falsely claim that the Nicaraguan government has deliberately failed to protect vulnerable communities, when police and army units do their best to control violent incidents. These incidents have involved the killing of campesinos trying to make a better life for their families but regarded by indigenous communities as invaders The army too has suffered casualties in its efforts to patrol the extensive territory in conflict which is also an area used by armed criminal gangs. None of this complexity is reflected in the glib falsity of the Global Witness Report and others like it. Nor did Global Witness research the work, positive or otherwise, of the Inter- Institutional Commission set up by President Ortega in December 2015. Despite all their readily verifiable failings, these reports are taken up and recycled by other organizations who, naively or deliberately, help spread falsehoods and misrepresentations given phony authority by the West’s highly developed media and NGO industrial disinformation network.

A big part of the relevant context for a genuinely concerned, factually based discussion of the land conflicts in northern Nicaragua is the categorical failure of Western governments to address the issue of Climate Justice. Related to that is the issue of indemnity for the vulnerable, impoverished countries affected by Climate Change. Poverty and increasingly volatile Climate Change are driving Nicaragua’s rapidly advancing deforestation and the consequent threat to vital natural reserves like Bosawas, Indio Maiz and others. The human consequences of those huge historical injustices are self-evident in the kinds of violent conflicts happening in areas like the indigenous peoples’ lands on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast. The Nicaraguan government hopes the mass reforestation program and employment opportunities of the proposed Interoceanic Canal will help fight Climate Change But all that indispensable context and other relevant facts are systematically omitted by Western media and NGOS and their local allies.

Those NGOs and media outlets betray the genuine, legitimate concern people in the West may have for environmental activists and indigenous peoples around the world by selectively misreporting the facts to further a clearly neocolonial economic, social and cultural agenda. That agenda is ultimately determined by class loyalties. The board members of George Soros-style NGOs like Global Witness or Front Line Defenders all come from the same managerial class as their counterparts at the Guardian or other similar undeservedly prestigious Western media . The fundamental political motive driving their agenda is the Western elites’ defense of their power and privilege by seeming to mitigate the systemic abuses on which Western capitalism is based. It suits those elites to falsify the facts and misrepresent the global context because doing so bolsters their phony moral authority, their increasingly precarious economic control and their totally illegitimate political power.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2016/07/ ... -and-ngos/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 01, 2022 11:40 pm

RACISM AND HYPOCRISY IN MEDIA COVERAGE OF THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE
1 Mar 2022 , 11:23 am .

Image
The whole world has been able to see how far the systemic racism of the main western media goes (Photo: File)

Aside from media hoaxes, fake news, and ongoing psy-ops via political spokespersons, information and propaganda media, and social media, Western coverage of the Russian Federation's special military operation in Ukraine is leaving traces of Eurocentric supremacism and racist hypocrisy.

The selectivity of indignation regarding armed conflicts is accentuated when the rod of the New Cold War is brought to the fore: the systematic aggressions against Palestinians, Yemenis, colonized Africans, Russian-speaking Donbass and other peoples of the Global South are totally or partially omitted while a kind of washing of the faces (and hands) of the belligerent Atlanticists who carry out said aggressions is carried out.

The whole world has been able to see the extent of the systemic racism of the mainstream Western media. Voices have been mounting criticizing these media conglomerates for their biased views towards people from places other than Europe and the United States.

The American journalist Alan MacLeod made a compilation of television moments in which the racist coverage of euro-gringo journalists and political spokesmen is shown in all its splendor. Let's see.

*From the BBC : "It's very emotional for me because I see how they kill Europeans with blue eyes and blonde hair," said Ukraine's Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze.

*Charlie D'Agata, CBS Foreign Correspondent : "This is not Iraq or Afghanistan... This is a relatively civilized and relatively European city," referring to Kiev.

*From Al-Jazeera : "What's compelling is looking at them, the way they're dressed. They're affluent, middle-class people. Obviously, they're not refugees trying to escape from the Middle East... or North Africa. They look like any European family that would live next to you".

*France's BFM TV : "We are in the 21st century, we are in a European city and we have cruise missile fire as if we were in Iraq or Afghanistan, can you imagine!?"

*Daniel Hannan for The Daily Telegraph : "This time the war is wrong because people look like us and have Instagram and Netflix accounts. It's not in a poor, remote country anymore."

*UK ITV : "The unthinkable has happened... This is not a Third World developing nation. This is Europe!"

*France's BFM TV (again): "It's an important question. We're not talking about fleeing Syrians here... We're talking about Europeans."
In the eighth tweet, MacLeod says: "If you speak French, try the racism buffet they offer you."

Other journalists and users on social networks also show what has been reiterated.

*NBC reporter : "These aren't refugees from Syria, they're from Ukraine. They're Christians. They're white. They look a lot like us."

*From La Sexta : "More than 400 children have stayed at the borders, they are not children that we are used to seeing on television, they are blond children with blue eyes, that is very important."

These two memes sum up very well what is happening at the level of Western media coverage.


In a statement , the Association of Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists refers to an "implicit racial bias in some of the coverage of Ukraine." The association categorically condemned and rejected the "orientalist and racist implications" towards the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

"This kind of commentary reflects the pervasive mindset in Western journalism of normalizing tragedy in parts of the world like the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. It dehumanizes and makes your experience of war normal and expected." , it says.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ra ... en-ucrania

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 02, 2022 4:01 pm

Every U.S. enemy Is Hitler: Notes from the Edge of The Narrative Matrix
Posted Mar 02, 2022 by Caitlin A. Johnstone

Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog (March 1, 2022 ) |

It’s just incredible how even after all this time, after all those wars, after all those lies, it’s not even occurring to most mainstream westerners to investigate whether the U.S. could possibly have had anything to do with starting the war in Ukraine.

There’s one asshole in the room who always starts shit. Any time any shit has started he’s always been involved. And hardly anyone’s even looking at him thinking, “I wonder if that shit-starting guy has anything to do with this?”



I am convinced that mainstream culture’s fascination with World War II has made us all dumber. Everyone just lives in this dopey children’s cartoon now where every U.S. enemy is Hitler and they’re the brave hero who is fighting Hitler.



Ukraine has no chance of winning this war alone, no matter how many weapons are sent to it. All weapons can do is make the war more costly for Russia, which it’s in the U.S. empire’s interests to do. Stop pretending your calls for more weapons are anything more noble than that.

You’re not trying to save lives; only the negotiation of a ceasefire can do that. All you’re doing with your calls to arm Ukraine is helping the most powerful empire that has ever existed make this war more expensive for Moscow and hurt Putin’s popularity at home and abroad.

This was the USA’s strategy in arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the first cold war; to give the Soviets their own Vietnam. A costly quagmire that consumed their wealth and military focus for years, contributing to their downfall. They’ve already re-employed this strategy in Syria, where a U.S. official openly admitted they worked to create a “quagmire” for Moscow:


Now they’re hoping to pull off the same trick again, to any extent possible. That’s all this is. It’s not about saving lives or stopping a war, it’s about grand chessboard maneuverings to maintain U.S. planetary domination.


This will not save lives. In fact if it is successful it will ensure the loss of a great many more as an unwinnable war drags on long after it could have been over. This doesn’t benefit Ukrainians. It doesn’t benefit Americans. It doesn’t benefit Europeans. It only benefits the unipolarist agendas of a few powerful psychopaths.


If you still want to support arming Ukraine on the basis that it will benefit the unipolar hegemony of a globe-spanning empire because you believe that empire’s continued dominance is a good thing, be my guest. But again, don’t pretend what you’re cheering for is anything nobler than that.



After 9/11 we were intensively bombarded with messaging about a sinister foreign leader, creating an environment of shrill hysteria that was very hard to stand up against. This was used to whip up support for pre-existing objectives of U.S. geostrategic dominance.

Sound familiar?

Would people have consented to two back-to-back full-scale ground invasions without 9/11 and the aggressive narrative management campaign which followed? Would people have consented to economic warfare that could hurt us all and nuclear brinkmanship that could get us all killed without the Ukraine invasion and the aggressive narrative management campaign accompanying it?

It’s times like these where it’s most important to be intensely, aggressively skeptical of the agendas of our rulers, and unfortunately it’s also times like these where you’ll get yelled at the most forcefully for doing so. But we know better than to be shouted into silence now.



More concerning than backing Nazi militias in Ukraine is the far more widespread, far more deadly, and equally white supremacist belief we’re seeing throughout the western world that invading a nation of white people is horrific while invading a nation of brown people is normal.



There are those who think maintaining a hostile client state on Russia’s border is worth any amount of brinkmanship to accomplish, and then there are those who understand what nuclear war is.



If these insane escalations between the U.S. and Russia don’t scare the shit out of you it’s either because you don’t understand them or because you are psychologically compartmentalizing away from what you do understand. It’s one or the other.

We are far, far too close to the brink of an unthinkable series of events from which there is no return. And none of the loudest voices are calling for it to be scaled back. They’re calling for it to escalate further. Sometimes a lot further.


Many influential pundits and politicians are now calling for a NATO no-fly zone in Ukraine, which would require directly attacking the Russian air force and Russian air defenses.


We’re speeding toward a cliff and nobody in charge has a foot anywhere near the brake pedal. If anything, the political/media class is demanding the gas pedal be pushed to the floor.


Is what the U.S. and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for? This is the single most important question in the world right now, and hardly anyone seems to be asking it.


Our rulers are rolling the dice on the life of every terrestrial organism, and people are still babbling about whether Democrats or Republicans are harder on Russia and trying to score political points. Hardly anyone has their head up and their eyes fixed on what may be coming.


If you heard something, looked outside, and saw a mushroom cloud growing in the distance, how much thought do you imagine you’d be having about the importance of NATO’s open-door policy with Ukraine?



Everyone’s freaking out about RT when all they’d have to do to kill it is simply allow leftist and antiwar opinions on western mass media. You’d steal their entire audience. But we all know that’s never going to happen because it was never actually about Russian state media; it’s about silencing opponents of the official imperial narrative.



Dear shitlibs,

Saying that hawkish escalations spearheaded by the most powerful empire in history led to undesirable consequences in Ukraine is not actually the same as an abuser saying “look what you made me do” and does not have “what-was-she-wearing energy.”

Love, Caitlin

This criticism shows up in my online notifications literally every single time I talk about the role of the U.S. empire in paving the way to the Ukraine invasion, and to be clear, the battered spouse and rape victim in their analogy is not Ukraine but the U.S. empire. The poor widdle U.S. empire. They’re literally demanding that no one on the internet criticize the most dangerous actions of the most powerful and destructive government on the face of this planet. At all. It’s just unbelievable that they think this is a normal and acceptable thing to do.

It’s simply forbidden to talk about the role the world’s largest power structure had in this conflict. You’re only allowed to say it’s happening solely because Putin is evil and hates freedom.



“You can criticize the U.S. empire AND Russia, Caitlin.”

One of those is already being criticized at fever pitch by literally all government and mainstream media institutions in the entire western world, while the other is almost never criticized by those institutions in any meaningful way.



I saw someone in the comments of a post about nuclear war say “it would be Putin’s fault” if one happens. Like that would be any consolation to anyone on earth when the bombs go off. People still think about this thing in terms of political point-scoring, that’s how fucked we are.

Deteriorating material conditions can cause people to rise up against their government. Imperialists understand this, which is why they work to foment unrest with starvation sanctions in empire-targeted nations while at home keeping people fed just enough to prevent an uprising.

https://mronline.org/2022/03/02/every-u ... ve-matrix/

Numerous screenshots at link.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 03, 2022 2:17 pm

Western Media Accuse China of Wanting to Do What US Does to Other Countries
GREGORY SHUPAK

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Wall Street Journal depiction of China as an imperialist octopus

WaPo: In their excesses, Putin and Xi might be unwittingly saving the West
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David Von Drehle (Washington Post, 2/15/22): “Xi…has reminded the world what a Chinese superpower really means—and why a strong alliance of democracies is necessary as an alternative.”
A flurry of recent newspaper articles have denounced what they describe as Chinese imperialism. Such texts are part of a new Cold War media blitz against China that simultaneously serves US imperialism by blessing it or denying that it exists.

Last month, the Washington Post (2/15/22) ran an opinion piece by David Von Drehle claiming that, “in a sense, the alliance of democracies” (by which he means the US and its partners) fell “into a fitful sleep” at the end of the Cold War. “What began as a happy dream of perpetual peace,” he contended, “changed in recent years to a nightmare,” featuring “Communist empire-building in China.”

The notion that there was a “happy dream of perpetual peace at the end of the Cold War” that only recently became a nightmare because of international bad guys like China suggests that Von Drehle himself has been not merely snoozing but comatose. Just as the Cold War ended, the American empire killed thousands of civilians in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm (FAIR.org, 10/28/21). US-led imperialism spent much of the rest of the decade prosecuting a war against the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, ultimately helping to take the country apart (Monthly Review, 10/07).

Before the tenth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demise, the US was attacking Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21), and less than two years after that it was carrying out an invasion of Iraq that would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians (Jacobin, 6/19/14). That period, which Von Drehle regards as a favorable one in global affairs, was quite the “nightmare” for the millions on the wrong end of American bombs and bullets.

Perhaps the author is worried that China might start doing to other countries what the US routinely does, even though China has not, at any point in its modern history, committed an international crime comparable to any one of those that the US enacted in the years immediately after the Cold War—or in the years since, in countries like Libya (Jacobin, 9/2/13) and Syria (New York Times, 11/13/21; FAIR.org, 4/20/18; Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17).

‘A semi-peripheral country’
Monthly Review: China: Imperialism or Semi-Periphery?
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Minqi Li (Monthly Review, 7–8/21): “China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor.”
Many academics who study Chinese foreign policy are reluctant to reduce China’s position in the world economy to that of “empire-building.” For example, Minqi Li of the University of Utah (Monthly Review, 7–8/21) writes:

The currently available evidence does not support the argument that China has become an imperialist country in the sense that China belongs to the privileged small minority that exploits the great majority of the world population. On the whole, China continues to have an exploited position in the global capitalist division of labor and transfers more surplus value to the core (historical imperialist countries) than it receives from the periphery. However, China’s per capita GDP has risen to levels substantially above the peripheral income levels and, in terms of international labor transfer flows, China has established exploitative relations with nearly half of the world population (including Africa, South Asia and parts of East Asia). Therefore, China is best considered a semi-peripheral country in the capitalist world system.

Claudio Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), the Argentine academic, argues that China is a “potential” empire: It “appropriates surpluses from the underdeveloped economies,” but its approach to the military dimension of geopolitics has been to act defensively. He writes:

In contrast to the United States, England or France, China’s capitalists are not accustomed to calling on the political-military intervention of their state when they confront difficulties in their international business. They have no tradition of invasions or coups when confronted by countries that nationalize companies or suspend debt payment. No one knows how quickly the Chinese state will or will not adopt those imperialist habits.

Such level-headed analyses complicate Von Drehle’s simplistic assertions, which could be why he leaves them out of the conversation.

‘Imperialism on the march in the East’

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (1/13/22), Robert D. Kaplan described Western imperialism as a feature of the past, rather than a present reality, three times. “Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism,” the piece began. “But the imperialism on the march today is in the East.” He went on to claim that “unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese…take pride in their imperial legacies.” The article ended with Kaplan’s assertion that “the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.”

Meanwhile, the US empire “truly endures” in the approximately 750 military bases it has in at least 80 countries (Al Jazeera, 9/10/21). China, by contrast, has just one overseas military base (Foreign Policy, 7/7/21).

A puerile cartoon accompanied Kaplan’s piece, and it too denied contemporary American imperialism: A pair of giant octopuses are standing on a chessboard shaking hands. One octopus is covered in the red and yellow stars of China’s flag, the other in Russian colors; they’re holding all of the chess pieces, while a much smaller Uncle Sam looks on without any. The United States, in other words, is a powerless bystander with no holdings in the imperial great game.

The US spends more on its military than any other country, accounting for 39% of all global military expenditure in 2020, and dramatically outpaces China in this regard, especially in per capita terms: In 2020, the US spent an estimated $778 billion on its armed forces, and China allocated an estimated $252 billion to its military (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 4/26/21)—$2,365 for each US citizen vs. $180 for each citizen of China.

Similarly, Washington and its Western allies’ grip on the global financial system demonstrates that Western imperialism is chugging along. The US dollar is the global reserve currency (Atlantic, 9/6/21), not the yuan. The US and its partners are in control of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20)—rather consequential chess pieces—while China doesn’t dominate any institution of global economics or governance of similar magnitude. Amid these conditions, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea and the rich economies of Europe—most of which are “in the West”—have drained $152 trillion dollars from the Global South since 1960 (Al Jazeera, 5/6/21).

‘No longer the imperialism of the West’
Guardian: In China’s new age of imperialism, Xi Jinping gives thumbs down to democracy
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Simon Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21): “It’s difficult to regard Xi…as anything other than a totalitarian control freak with imperial fantasies.”
Simon Tisdall of the Guardian (12/12/21) sounded a similar note in his article on “China’s New Age of Imperialism.” Like Kaplan, he referred to US imperialism in the past tense:

Imperialism, in all its awful forms, still poses a threat. But it is no longer the imperialism of the West, rightly execrated and self-condemned. Today’s threat emanates from the East. Just as objectionable, and potentially more dangerous, it’s the prospect of a totalitarian 21st-century Chinese global empire.

That Western imperialism is apparently “no longer” a threat will undoubtedly come as a relief to Afghans. Their country is on the brink of famine, with US sanctions effectively ensuring that Afghanistan can’t be fed (New York Times, 12/4/21):

Such widespread hunger is the most devastating sign of the economic crash that has crippled Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. Practically overnight, billions of dollars in foreign aid that propped up the previous Western-backed government vanished and US sanctions on the Taliban isolated the country from the global financial system, paralyzing Afghan banks and impeding relief work by humanitarian organizations.

When Tisdall wasn’t erasing American attempts to starve millions of people, he was inflating alleged Chinese threats to America, writing:

US media reported last week that the port city of Bata in Equatorial Guinea could become China’s first Atlantic seaboard naval base—potentially putting warships and submarines within striking distance of America’s East Coast. It is said to be considering an island airbase in Kiribati that could in theory threaten Hawaii. Meanwhile, it continues to militarize atolls in the South China Sea.

Yet the US having bases that put it “within striking distance” of China isn’t just a theoretical possibility: The US military already has nearly 300 military bases spread across East Asia, with seven more in nearby Australia. In September, the US, Britain and Australia announced a new military alliance aimed at China, which will involve a further military buildup (Salon, 10/28/21).

Tisdall reduced the militarization of the South China Sea to a simplistic tale of a belligerent Chinese empire, rather than discussing these and other contexts, such as RIMPAC, a biennial US-led naval maneuver. RIMPAC is the world’s largest maritime exercise and functions as a show of force to China, which was disinvited from the festivities in 2018 (Washington Post, 8/17/20). Similarly, the US routinely sends naval ships through the South China Sea (CNN, 5/20/21), a move that antagonizes China about as much as Chinese vessels sailing through the Gulf of Mexico would upset the US.

Even though Tisdall repeatedly denied that American imperialism is ongoing, near the end of the article he acknowledged that the US has vastly more global power than China: “By key measures—the number of overseas bases, alliances, military strike-power—America still greatly outstrips China’s regime.” He then changed his earlier opposition to “imperialism, in all its awful forms,” asserting that the US “greatly outstrips” China “in terms of respect for human values and rights.”

Yet weeks before Tisdall’s article, UNICEF reported that 10,000 Yemeni children have been killed in the war on the country, which the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis and which the US fuels and has fueled from the start (In These Times, 11/22/21; Middle East Eye, 11/17/17). The US has likewise demonstrated its disrespect for “human values and rights” by using its control of the international financial system to levy sanctions against Venezuela that, according to an estimate from two US economists, killed approximately 40,000 Venezuelans between August 2017 and April 2019 (CEPR, 4/25/19). No contemporary Chinese foreign policy is responsible for nearly as much suffering.

‘Imperial geography’

To try to prove that China is the world’s foremost imperial threat, the coverage also points to China’s relations with Taiwan, and to its treatment of peoples living in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau. This aspect of the argument is odd, in that imperialism, in its contemporary usage, tends to refer to international relations. For instance, Tisdall (Guardian, 12/12/21) says Chinese state repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, or of residents of Hong Kong, amount to Xi acting like “a latter-day Roman emperor,” a plank in the writer’s assertion that China has less “respect for human values and rights” than the US empire.

While there is evidence of significant human rights violations in both places, Tisdall provides no basis for believing that China has less of a claim to them than the US—or its close settler-colonial allies, such as Canada, Australia or New Zealand—does to Indigenous lands seized by European invaders from thousands of miles of way, or that China has done so in an even more brutal fashion.

Like Tisdall, Kaplan (Wall Street Journal, 1/13/22) calls Hong Kong and Macau part of China’s “imperial geography,” a peculiar way to describe two regions returned to China by Western imperial powers: Britain gave back Hong Kong in 1997, and Portugal did the same with Macau in 1999. The author also writes that Xinjiang and Tibet “represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule,” which is one way of saying that China has had authority over Xinjiang since the 18th century (BBC, 9/26/14). As for Tibet, Robert Barnett (NPR, 4/11/08), director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University, says that “Tibet has never been considered independent by major players on the world stage.”

Kaplan also points to Chinese saber-rattling against Taiwan. The latter has many of the trappings of a state, but only 13 countries regard it as an independent nation (New York Times, 12/10/21).

None of this is to suggest that China should resolve the Taiwan question militarily. Nor is to endorse Chinese policies in Macau, Hong Kong, Tibet or Xinjiang. The point is that authors like Tisdall and Kaplan are playing fast and loose with history and international law, and applying wildly unequal standards that cast China as an evil empire and the United States as alternately a benign empire or not an empire at all.

Longer-term trend
Atlantic: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
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Atlantic (2/6/21): “The truth about the widely, perhaps willfully, misunderstood case of Hambantota Port is long overdue.”
These recent articles are part of a longer-term trend across much of the corporate media. Last summer, a Slate article (7/14/21) maintained:

Beijing is capable of perpetuating imperialism in its own right. One case in point is the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive program of investments and infrastructure projects abroad. Designed to overcome China’s own overproduction dilemma at a time of stagnating wages and inadequate domestic demand, it targets developing countries in the region with extraterritorial legal arrangements, debt-trap diplomacy and, unsurprisingly, environmental exploitation.

The authors aren’t the only ones in corporate media to make this claim about the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (Washington Post, 8/27/18). While BRI can give China leverage over borrowers, there is academic research that calls into question whether BRI amounts to imperialism: For example, Deborah Brautigam and Meg Rithmire (Atlantic, 2/6/21), of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, respectively, studied BRI and disputed the charge that it is a form of “modern-day colonialism.” “Chinese banks are willing to restructure the terms of existing loans and have never actually seized an asset from any country,” they noted.

In 2020, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (10/1/20) characterized BRI as “imperial overreach,” citing Africa and Latin America as examples. Justin Podur (FAIR.org, 1/31/22) recently demonstrated that there is no convincing analogy between China’s policies in Africa and those of European empires, and it’s equally rich for the leading US financial paper to accuse another country of imperialism in Latin America. Katz (Life on the Left, 9/6/21), noting the “overwhelming intrusion of the US embassies” in Latin America, points out that “China is miles away from any such encroachment”: “Profiting from the sale of manufactured goods and the purchase of raw materials is not the same as sending the Marines, training police and financing coups d’état.”

Two months before the Journal essay, a Newsweek article (8/31/20) claimed that

Xi is now openly promoting imperial-era views that the Chinese emperor had the right and obligation to rule tianxia, or “all under heaven,” thereby suggesting China should now be considered the world’s only sovereign state.

It would be remarkable if Xi said that China should rule “all under heaven,” or be the “world’s only sovereign state,” but the author provides no source to that effect, and I can find no evidence that Xi has. While US leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power the US has secured for itself comes closer than that of anyone else. While Washington’s leaders don’t say that they think the United States should “be considered the world’s only sovereign state,” the power it has secured for itself brings the US government much closer to having that type of authority than any other state.

Instead of carefully considering the implications of China’s rise for the rest of the world, these articles have opted to whip up xenophobia against the country while also glossing over—if not outright cheering—US imperialism.

https://fair.org/home/western-media-acc ... countries/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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