Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Sep 24, 2024 1:33 pm

Red and African Stream Latest Media to Face US Bans Over Alleged Russia Ties
Posted by Internationalist 360° on September 21, 2024
Robert Inlakesh

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After months of unverified claims from German media alleging that Red Media has ties to Moscow and helped incite pro-Palestine demonstrations, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that the Leftist media outlet is part of a Russian intelligence operation aimed at interfering in foreign elections. Blinken’s statement escalates the accusations, aligning them with broader concerns about foreign influence on democratic processes.

At the onset of the Ukraine war, media outlets connected to the Russian state-run Ruptly agency, such as RT, faced widespread bans across Europe and Canada. These restrictions also extended to the United States, where they were forced to stop broadcasting. Among these was Redfish, a prominent Leftist media outlet with a contract with Ruptly, which ultimately had to suspend its operations as a result of the sanctions.

After widespread censorship of Russian-affiliated media in the West in 2022, journalists who previously worked for these outlets sought new platforms. One such outlet is Red (Revolutionary Educational Documentaries) Media, headed by Managing Director Huseyin Dogru, a former senior employee at Redfish.

Red Media continues to produce content focusing on leftist and revolutionary narratives, following in the footsteps of the journalists’ previous work despite the restrictions placed on Russian-linked media organizations.

German newspaper Tagesspiegel published an extensive report alleging that Red was covertly controlled by Russia and played a role in organizing pro-Palestine protests, including the Humboldt University student encampment. The article cited the outlet’s employment of former RT and Redfish journalists as evidence. However, Red Media has firmly denied these accusations, categorically rejecting claims of being a Russian propaganda outlet and asserting its editorial independence.

“We might be targeted now, but this whole censorship campaign is not just about us. They are laying the foundation for a crackdown on all critical voices. This is already happening. MintPress has also experienced censorship and attacks. Before our accounts were taken down, they took down accounts of other outlets like Electronic Intifada, for example,” Red’s Huseyin Dogru told MintPress.

During a September 13 press briefing, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused Russia of covertly running media platforms, telling reporters, “RT covertly runs the Berlin-based English-language platform Red, a successor to the now defunct RT-linked platform Redfish. RT also secretly runs the online platform African Stream across a wide range of social media platforms. Now, according to the outlet’s website, ‘African Stream is’ – and I quote – ‘a pan-African digital media organization based exclusively on social media platforms, focused on giving a voice to all Africans both at home and abroad.’ In reality, the only voice it gives is to Kremlin propagandists.”

We are appreciative of everyone’s concern regarding our website. We made some slight technical adjustments to better protect ourselves from the consequences of Blinken’s attacks on us.

Visit our site here: https://t.co/M9h3pcvaxG.

⚠️ First, Anthony Blinken targeted us. Then,… pic.twitter.com/zn68ywNCNM

— red. (@redstreamnet) September 19, 2024


African Stream, led by former PressTV journalist Ahmed Kaballo and based in Kenya, has vehemently denied accusations of being a Kremlin propaganda tool. These allegations were mentioned in a U.S. State Department “fact sheet” released on September 13, which also cited Tagesspiegel’s claims that Red had organized pro-Palestine protests in Germany. The State Department highlighted this as part of a broader effort to expose Russian influence in global media and protest movements.

Addressing the claim that Red was instigating pro-Palestine protests, Huseyin Dogru told MintPress News that the allegations manipulated the facts. He explained that Red had built trust within activist circles, and as a result, they were informed of the occupation at Berlin’s Humboldt University. While Red was among the first to report on the scene, Dogru argued that Tagesspiegel framed this journalistic work in a way to criminalize both Red and the protests, questioning the independence of the newspaper’s sources.

Neither the German government nor the German media liked what we were doing. So several so-called “independent” media outlets, as well as research outlets, started to look into us. Tagesspiegel then decided to write a hit piece on us. First, they said that Red media is instigating the protests in Germany: ‘The video platform ‘Red’ was the first medium in the occupied HU building and worked together with pro-Palestinian groups.’

Their evidence was that we were the first ones on the scene when the University in Berlin was occupied. Yes, we were not the only ones, but one of the first ones there, and we were informed about the occupation as people have trusted us over the last 12 months because of our coverage and shared information with us—protests, occupations, and other things. Having a source as a journalist was framed by Tagesspiegel in a very manipulative way to criminalize us and the protests themselves.

Tagesspiegel was cited by Blinken, and Tagesspiegel constantly gets information/sources from the German police and intelligence. Maybe we should ask ourselves if Tagesspiegel is not part of the German intelligence or even directly working for them?”


Regarding the allegations of Red’s ties to Redfish and RT, Dogru dismissed the claims, stating that the only basis for such accusations is that some employees previously worked at Redfish. Dogru drew a comparison, arguing that just as one cannot assume Germans today are Nazis because their families had Nazi affiliations, one cannot make the same assumption about Red due to former employment connections. He further criticized Tagesspiegel, suggesting that their alleged Nazi past might influence their support for the Israeli state’s actions in Palestine.

“These allegations were made for one reason: To undermine the legitimate and important protests against the genocide in Palestine committed by Israel and the complicity of the West. The best way to do this is to use the biggest fear or create a new fear to distract from all the other problems. If you create a conspiracy and frame it as a foreign state threat, people will believe that. This is what is happening,” Dogru added.

Shortly after the U.S. State Department’s allegations, Red and African Stream were banned from Meta and YouTube without detailed explanations. When asked about the impact of these actions, Dogru expressed concerns that the company might be forced to close. He feared that he could be arrested and charged with foreign intelligence activities, which could lead to imprisonment. Dogru emphasized that their only “crime” was conducting journalism that challenged Western imperialist narratives.

Stressing Red’s commitment to covering the war in Gaza and supporting Palestine, Dogru says, “We don’t want to make this case about us.” He highlighted that the current crackdown on Red could extend to all progressive voices, even those currently endorsing the bans. Dogru urged a united front among alternative media to support and protect each other, stating, We need to come together to create tens, hundreds, thousands, millions of voices fighting together against this censorship and crackdown—here in the West or in the East, everywhere in the world.”

Feature photo | Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a news conference about Russia’s alleged election interference at the Department of State in Washington, Sept. 13, 2024. Jose Luis Magana | AP

Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47

The censorship and demonetization of African Stream, enacted on orders from Tony Blinken, comes weeks after they interviewed Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Chérizier, who is uniting Haiti’s masses to resist the ongoing US proxy war of his country (which the anti-war left is largely silent… https://t.co/Jm79QqsOXI pic.twitter.com/cmYcIQBoxk

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) September 21, 2024




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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Sep 25, 2024 2:44 pm

Cognitive Warfare in the West
Posted by Internationalist 360° on September 24, 2024
Thierry Meyssan

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Rossia Segodnia is Russia’s public broadcasting group. It produces six television channels (RT Group), news agencies (Sputnik, RIA-Novosti) and websites (Voice of Europe). It is now administratively banned throughout the European Union and soon in the USA.

In the West, censorship is nothing more than a method of government from another age. NATO is waging a cognitive war, not against ideas and reasoning, but to alter citizens’ ability to take into account the way other cultures think. This war first led to the banning of the Russian media, RT, Sputnik and so on. Then, today, to exert very strong pressure against journalists, such as Scott Ritter or Jürgen Elsässer, who do not perceive Russians as enemies because they are capable of understanding them.


The Western vulgate on the conflict between the Anglo-Saxons and Russia does not tolerate contradiction. A number of personalities and companies who have reported on a different point of view have been subjected to arbitrary repression.

It all began, in France, during the May 2017 presidential election campaign. Two Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik, relayed hacked files from candidate Emmanuel Macron’s team and a deputy’s remarks about his alleged off Shore account in the Bahamas. Mr. Macron lodged a complaint against X (i.e. without naming the perpetrator), while the media concerned announced their intention to lodge a complaint for defamation (but the President could not be tried during his term of office). However, the situation remained unchanged until, a month later, Mr. Macron, who had been elected, held a press conference with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Versailles. He then described the Russian media as “an organ of influence [having] repeatedly produced untruths about my person and my campaign (…) Russia Today and Sputnik did not behave like press organs and journalists, but they behaved like organs of influence, propaganda, and misleading propaganda, nothing more, nothing less.”

In 2020, the British authorities give one interpretation of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, while RT gives another. The media regulator, the Office of Communication (Ofcom), issues a series of notices to the Russian channel and, ultimately, fines it £200,000, which are upheld by the High Court of Justice in London.

On March 10, 2021, the US Director of National Intelligence published a report on foreign threats during the 2020 elections [1]. She asserted that President Vladimir Putin had instructed his media to denigrate Joe Biden’s candidacy and thus support Donald Trump’s. However, none of this is reprehensible and no media is cited.

In 2022, German authorities are concerned by RT’s reporting of “Russian aggression against Ukraine”. The channel presented the Kremlin’s arguments on the “special military operation” made necessary by the presence of neo-Nazis in the Kiev government. They therefore banned it, and were soon followed by the EU. On February 27, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU-wide ban on RT and Sputnik. A few days later, YouTube closed European access to the channels of the channel and the agency. A month later, Canada also banned RT and Sputnik.

Censorship accelerated in 2024. On March 27, 2024, the Czech government banned the Voice of Europe website and imposed sanctions on former Ukrainian MP Viktor Medvedchuk for allegedly financing it. The same day, Polish police raided the site’s Warsaw offices and seized cash. On May 17, 2024, the EU banned RIA-Novosti as well as Voice of Europe, Izvestia and Rossiïskaïa Gazeta.

Neither in the USA nor in the EU has there ever been a case against RT, Spunik, RIA-Novosti, Voice of Europe, Izvestia and Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Their bans are purely administrative. In the EU, freedom of expression does not apply to Russian media.

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The German federal police launched some twenty high-profile raids to suppress an imaginary crime, and seized a large quantity of equipment. The administrative court annulled the entire procedure.

On July 15, 2024, the German Federal Police raided the homes of Jürgen Elsässer, editor-in-chief of Compact, Magazin für Souveränität, and around twenty of his colleagues. They searched for evidence of a coup d’état, seizing a great deal of material but finding nothing. At the same time, the Minister of the Interior, the socialist Nancy Fraeser, administratively banned the magazine.

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FBI search of Scott Ritter’s home. The former inspector of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) charged with overseeing the elimination of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq made a name for himself by denouncing the lies of President George Bush. Today, he perseveres by denouncing Atlanticist rhetoric on the Ukrainian conflict.

On August 7, 2024, Scott Ritter’s home was searched by the FBI for evidence of Russian funding. Here too, the federal police seized a great deal, but found nothing. Mr. Ritter’s only fault is that, since the war against Iraq, he has never stopped analyzing the lies of the US government, a form of protest that is in principle permitted in a democracy.

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On August 14, 2024, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig annulled the ban on Compact, Magazin für Souveränität, pending the presentation by the Scholz government of evidence of the conspiracy of which it accused the magazine. He demands that the seizures made from Jürgen Elsässer and his collaborators be returned to him. In reality, Mr. Elsässer’s only crime is to have declared that the Scholz government is betraying the German people and that he would like to see it overthrown – an opinion, admittedly radical, but in principle permissible in a democracy. In addition to his magazine, he has set up an Internet channel seen by 1.2 million Germans every day.

On September 4, Washington announced criminal proceedings and sanctions in response to attempts to interfere in the elections, which it blamed on Russia. The State Department imposed visa restrictions on the Rossia Segodnia media group.

On September 13, 2024, in an interview with the press, Secretary of State Antony Blinken criticized the destabilizing activities of RT, which he described as a “branch” of Russian intelligence around the world. Almost two years earlier, his department had published a special report: Kremlin-funded media: the role of RT and Sputnik in the Russian disinformation and propaganda system [2]. Three days after the Secretary of State, on September 16, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, declared, “Rossia Segodnia, RT and other related entities are now banned from our apps worldwide due to their foreign interference activities.”

Of course, one might think that these cases are unrelated, even though they all involve media outlets. This is unlikely, given that the US and EU authorities have violated the principle of freedom of expression enshrined in the US Constitution and in European law. The question arises as to which body is coordinating these actions and for what purpose.

In 2016, I reported on the creation of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center [3] and, in 2022, of the Disinformation Governance Board by the Biden administration [4]. The former unit still exists and is expanding, while the latter has been dissolved, its director moving to the British Foreign Office.

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The whole system now aims to intervene as far upstream as possible. Drawing on the latest discoveries in neuroscience, the aim is to steer brains before they even think: this is “cognitive warfare”. This theory is a French invention, the brainchild of three Bordelais, François du Cluzel, Bernard Claverie and Baptiste Prébot [5] within NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, under the command of Generals André Lanata and Philippe Lavigne.

From the point of view of cognitive warfare, we need to intervene as soon as possible, before certain ideas gain ground. That’s why, in February 2022, when Russia implemented UN Security Council Resolution 2022 (misleadingly dubbed “Russian aggression” by Atlanticist propaganda), Russia’s opponents hesitated to ban Russian culture, then fell back on banning Russian media. Ultimately, the ideal for them is to ban not Russian relays in the media, but media that attempt to understand Russian thought.

The enemy is no longer the one who anonizes Kremlin communiqués, but the one who tries to understand the Russian way of thinking. This used to be the function of diplomats: to understand other people’s way of thinking. But on April 16, 2022, President Macron dissolved the diplomatic corps just after he had Russian media banned in France, and a few weeks ago his administration arrested Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, guilty of giving his users a private means of communication and thus chatting with Russians.

These efforts are most likely being coordinated by Nato’s Strategic Communications Center, the only body with both experience of cognitive warfare and the authority to have particular media banned and individuals arrested.

According to our information, the targets are determined by the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bayerisches Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz). This office was set up in 1950 by the US High Commissioner to occupied Germany, John McCloy. It was staffed by former SS and Gestapo officers. Nothing has changed since then: a few months ago, for example, this office classified around a hundred opposition groups, including the Attac association and the Die Linke party, as “left-wing extremist”, accusing them of links with terrorism and recommending that they be banned.

To my great surprise, I had the opportunity to verify that this office classifies me as a “Russian agent of influence” because of my defense of international law drawn up by the government of Nicholas II and the French Nobel Peace Prize winner Léon Bourgeois [6]. Apparently, these sleuths only reacted to the reference to the Tsar, ignoring that of the illustrious French politician, President of the Council and President of the Senate.

Notes:

[1] Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections, Avril Haines, March 10, 2021.

[2] Kremlin-Funded Media : RT and Sputnik’s Role in Russia’s Desinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem, Global Engagement Center, January 2022.

[3] “The NATO campaign against freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 5 December 2016.

[4] “The West renounces freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation TheAltWorld, Voltaire Network, 10 November 2022.

[5] Cognitive Warfare, François du Cluzel, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation, November 2020.

[6] “What international order?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 7 November 2023.

Translation by Roger Lagassé

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/09/ ... -the-west/

British Intel’s ‘Counter-Disinfo’ War Goes Global
Posted by Internationalist 360° on September 24, 2024
Kit Klarenberg

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CDU’s overseas relationships, with countries across Europe and North America, and even as far afield as Colombia

On September 13th, an extraordinary document was released via litigation against the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is an August 2021 slide deck presentation by Britain’s shadowy, spook-infested Counter Disinformation Unit to the White House National Security Council’s Interagency Policy Committee, which regularly gathers Washington’s spying services together to coordinate on national security matters. The contents amply expose how London’s long-running use and abuse of security and intelligence agencies to warp online perceptions is, by design, spreading the world over.

The presentation, which has never hitherto been publicly revealed, was delivered by CDU operatives on August 10th 2021. At this time, the NSC was meeting daily to discuss policing and suppression of pandemic-related speech within and without the US. The British were seemingly invited to offer the Council best practice guidance on battling “disinformation” and “misinformation”, based on their experiences of managing the CDU, which was founded in 2019. Initially operating in total secrecy, London’s “intelligence community” has been central to its efforts since inception.

The Biden administration’s untrammelled censorship push during the COVID19 pandemic was absolutely rabid, and brazen. Overt state policing of social media so enraged and terrified average US citizens, even Mark Zuckerberg has felt compelled to issue a major mea culpa. In August, he admitted senior US officials successfully “pressured” Facebook to remove untold swaths of dissenting content throughout this period, in almost every case completely egregiously. Meta’s CEO unconvincingly pledged to “push back” against any similar government bullying in future.

As the world’s foremost purveyor and enforcer of mass censorship, Britain’s CDU was inevitably of enormous interest to the Biden administration. Yet, suppression is just one component of the Unit’s – and by extension London’s – neverending quest for narrative control, and dominance, both on- and offline. As we shall see, psychological warfare, stalking, and harassment are all part of the CDU’s clandestine toolkit. The newly-released file reveals British intelligence is exporting this sinister “counter-disinformation” credo to every corner of the globe.

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Due to the nigh-total conspiracy of official silence cloaking the CDU to date, the document provides unprecedentedly candid insight into the Unit’s activities and modus operandi. The details are certain to have enormous relevance throughout Europe and North America, for the Unit’s tendrils, and structure, now extend throughout the world. The international proliferation of this very British censorship, surveillance and manipulation mechanism could well account for so many information ecosystems becoming effective wings of the Anglo-American national security state since the COVID19 pandemic.

‘Domestic Dissent’

In the slide deck, CDU is predictably described in anodyne terms. It states the Unit “works across Departmental boundaries and is mandated to provide the most comprehensive picture possible about the extent, scope and impact of disinformation during times of heightened risk.” The Unit is said to have “stood up an operational response to counter disinformation during the 2019 European elections, the 2019 UK General Election,” and had been extremely active since March 2020 “in response to Covid-19.”

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An accompanying diagram places the CDU at the very core of the British state, and deep state. Internal “monitoring” and “open source” teams within major government departments feed reports on “disinformation” to the Unit, which then receives “support” from “agencies” – a euphemism for Britain’s security and intelligence services – and vice versa, before coordinating with Whitehall on how to “respond”. Often, this entails ordering social media companies to throttle or purge content, or particular users/accounts.

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It could also extend to “non-platform interventions”, such as “proactive and reactive communications.” Their nature is unstated, but it may be instructive that the CDU works in close tandem with the newly-created and similarly opaque Government Information Cell, “to identify and counter Russian disinformation targeted at UK and international audiences.” The Cell “brings together expertise from across government”, including “experts” on “analysis, disinformation, and behaviour and attitudinal change” drawn from the security and intelligence services, and directly coordinates with major social media platforms.

“Behaviour and attitudinal change” is also the beat of 77th Brigade. The British Army’s psychological warfare unit worked in lockstep with the CDU throughout the pandemic. The Brigade’s online operations are as opaque as they are apparently vast. This includes maintaining a sizable militia of real, fake, and automated social media accounts to disseminate and amplify pro-government messaging, while monitoring and discrediting the British state’s enemies, be they domestic or foreign.

After 77th Brigade’s 2015 launch, it was repeatedly claimed by officials the unit not only didn’t conduct information warfare operations targeting British citizens, but was legally prohibited from doing so. When in April 2020 then-British military chief Nick Carter announced the Brigade was “helping to quash rumours from misinformation, but also counter disinformation” related to the COVID19 pandemic, it raised obvious anxieties these safeguards were being breached. Such concerns were quietly confirmed in June that year by an Army spokesperson:

“The [Ministry of Defence] has been working within the Cabinet Office’s Rapid Response Unit to tackle a range of harmful narratives online. As a UK government unit, [77th Brigade] have two primary audiences – government departments and British citizens, as well as anyone else seeking reliable information online.”

In January 2023, an ex-Brigade whistleblower revealed how longstanding domestic laws and civilian protections were routinely circumvented by the CDU and 77th Brigade, throughout the government’s crusade against pandemic dissent:

“To skirt the legal difficulties of a military unit monitoring domestic dissent, the view was that unless a profile explicitly stated their real name and nationality they could be a foreign agent and were fair game. But it is quite obvious that our activities resulted in the monitoring of the UK population…These posts did not contain information that was untrue or co-ordinated.”

In the process, an untold number of people within and without Britain were subjected to psychological manipulation strategies honed for use on battlefields, against enemy militaries. Accordingly, the online profile of a 77th Brigade veteran who oversaw “countering dis- and mis-information during the COVID19 crisis” was deployed straight from a tour of West Asia, where they “successfully implemented behavioural change strategies against ISIS.”

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It wasn’t just average citizens on the receiving end. Investigations by Big Brother Watch indicate the CDU and 77th Brigade kept a very close eye on the online statements of government ministers, elected lawmakers, academics, journalists and citizens. Their crime? Opposing vaccine passports, lambasting poor state financial support for businesses, questioning the modelling used to justify a second lockdown in November 2020, and criticising NATO, among other non-pandemic matters. What response the British state cooked up in each case is left to our imaginations.

‘International Engagement’

In April 2024, British parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report, Misinformation and trusted voices. It contained a scathing section on the CDU, describing the unit as “one of the most opaque…in government outside of the security services.” Despite receiving assurances from Whitehall officials that the CDU did not “drill down into individuals” or censor material, and simply “identified narratives…gaining traction in a particular area,” the Committee remained deeply suspicious. It declared:

“We are concerned about the lack of transparency and accountability of the CDU and the appropriateness of its reach. We recommend that the Government commission and lay before parliament an independent review of the activities and strategy of Counter Disinformation Unit [sic] within the next 12 months.”

There is as yet no indication that such a review has been initiated in Britain. Nonetheless, it is surely of the utmost urgency similar probes are conducted in a great many other countries, to gauge contacts between the CDU and foreign governments, and the extent to which this may have informed the latter’s approaches to stifling inconvenient truths and dissenting viewpoints. Several slides in the declassified presentation refer to the Unit’s “international engagement”.

One refers to the CDU collaborating “with partners to counter disinformation.” This includes, “sharing ideas and open source intelligence; building coalitions; sharing lessons learned; exploring and delivering programmes and joint campaigns; multilateral cooperation to counter disinformation.” Another boasts of the Unit’s “bilateral engagement with 20+ countries”, “international training and capability”, and “joint working” with the Five Eyes global spying network.

These excerpts strongly suggest the CDU is a key nucleus for Western governments to collude in influencing online discourse, and maintain narrative unanimity on national security matters. The Bucha incident may provide a case in point. It’s been confirmed the CDU censored online content related to alleged massacre. Western countries, led by Britain, framing mysterious killings in the occupied Ukrainian town as a targeted genocide by Russian forces was fundamental to sabotaging fruitful peace negotiations between Moscow and Kiev in May 2022.

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In this context, slides on London’s “wider disinformation policy work” at home take on a particularly disquieting character. These sections discuss how the CDU’s operations interact with a wider domestic legislative framework, which allows authorities “to take action against companies that fail to comply with the government’s online speech regulations,” while prosecuting and penalising alleged disseminators of “disinformation”. The content resembles a sales brochure, outlining the benefits of these restrictive laws and sweeping powers, encouraging partner states to follow Britain’s example.

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An accompanying map depicts the CDU’s overseas relationships, with countries across Europe and North America, and even as far afield as Colombia. If any constituent governments have taken draconian measures to tackle the alleged plague of “disinformation” in recent years, there is a high likelihood they acted based on a script drawn up by British intelligence, and continue to do so today.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/09/ ... es-global/

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“Mixing Pop and Politics, A Marxist History of Popular Music” – book review
Originally published: Counterfire on September 19, 2024 by Charles Marriott (more by Counterfire) | (Posted Sep 25, 2024)

‘We are on a road to nowhere, Come on inside’

Popular history of the post-war period is history written by the winners, ‘where all roads lead to neoliberalism’ (p.9). This history, in the words of Francois Hartog, is ‘an invitation for collective amnesia’ (p.11). By stripping out the idea of struggle, and the potential for change, we end up with a sanitised history with music as pure commodity and the masses as the mere temple slaves to the market. In this deep, richly textured book, Manning wants to challenge the history of the winners and the ideas that music is imposed from above and is ‘consumer capitalism writ too large’ (p.5). In its place, we are asked to see music and popular culture as dialectical; a struggle between ‘dominant ideology and popular imaginary, consent and refusal’ (p.5). Music is a form that in Marxist terms is in ‘fluid movement’ (p.5) and offers us a ‘resource of hope for the present, to inspire and incite us to push into the future’ (p.13).

One of the highlights of the book is the periodisation of the chapters; instead of sticking to decades, or longer time periods, each chapter is designed naturally around musical and historical breaks. We have 1953 to 1958, the era of the nuclear family, the nuclear threat and rock’n’roll’s revolt followed by the morbid symptoms of long-1950s cuteness from 1958 to 1964 through to punk, disco and authoritarian pop of 1977 to 1981. These short periods reflect the fluidity of popular culture and history from counterculture to reaction, from revolt to commodification, from utopian to dystopian and from hope to resignation.

This periodisation enables the reader to enjoy the longer perspective of the whole work and dip back into time periods, and musical styles from punk to glam to disco, from rave to rap to grunge. Each period is a rich diet of songs, song lyrics of chart music from the USA and UK that to some may be an overindulgence, but to others will feel like a banquet. Whatever your tastes, your historical, theoretical and musical horizons will be challenged, and your mind will be thinking of lyrics, songs, artists and movements that you would have included. This is a neat trick that will have me returning again and again to this book.

‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom’
In popular history, and the eyes of right-wing politicians and commentators from the late 1970s onwards, the 1950s was the period of lost innocence. It is a period sterilised and stylised in Happy Days and American Graffiti. This collective amnesia is reflected in what happens if you look up Elvis on your streaming service. What you get as the most popular song is the from the waist up, balladeering, ‘sophisticated lethargy’ (p.45) of ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ rather than the adversarial, exciting, inciting and inspiring ‘Hound Dog’. The 1950s of this history fetishes ‘order, religion and property’ (p.15) with wholesome images of dad as the suited, bread-winning, company man with mom baking apple pie, which even led Harold MacMillan in 1957 to declare ‘we’ve never had it so good’ (p.15).

As the author argues ‘if everything was so peachy perfect, why did rock’n’roll happen?’ (p.16). Here is a story of the working class of non-professional musicians, across colour line, on independent labels, storming into history to challenge the conformity of segregation and social apartheid, patriarchy and the cult of domesticity and the heavy-handed patrolling of sexuality. The author invites us to think of the unfettered freedom of ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Long Tall Sally’ of Little Richard, and the ‘all disorientation, all excitement, all sex’ (p.2) of ‘Hound Dog’. The author also invites to think of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’, where the song’s car culture stands as a mirror to a society where African American car ownership was more utopia than reality, as seen in the 1955 Bus Boycott. Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ sees the singer satirising conservative commentators’ hollow claims that the USA was a level playing field whatever the colour of your skin or your class, whilst ‘School Days’ concludes with the utopian couplet ‘Hail, hail rock and roll/ Deliver me from days of old’ (p.25).

It was not just the music; it was the fashion. No longer buttoned down, smoothed down and suited, the youth were greased up, rolled up and dressed in blue-collar and rustic fabrics like denim and plaid (p.35). The youth presented themselves as objects of envy and desire, challenging the dominant ideology and rejecting class hierarchy (p.39). However, capitalism quickly ‘exploited and then contained rock’n’roll’s anarchic energy’ (p.40) with major labels reasserting entertainment over excitement. Mad Men reflects this era of the late 1950 and early 1960s dramatizing how ‘advertising co-opted 50s discontent into consumerism and, as Thomas Frank argues, “made of alienation a motor for fashion”’ (p.47).

The right’s desire to turn its gaze back to the 1950s as an age of responsibility and order is built on sand. This was also a period of challenge to the right’s certainties on race, gender, class and sexuality. It is there in its music which reminds of the possibilities for the future whilst being an echo of the past. Eddie Cochrane’s ‘Summertime Blues’ still raises a fist to the alienation of work (p.458) by raising a fuss ‘about workin’ all summer just to try to an’ earn a dollar’ and raises a holler about the fact that ‘Everytime I call my baby, to try to get a date, my boss says, no dice, son, you gotta work late’.

‘It’s a competitive world’
The 1980s of Thatcher and Reagan is in popular history the natural endpoint of the failure of social democracy and reveals a collective amnesia about the fact that, according to New Economics Foundation research, 1976 was the peak year of British national happiness, whilst the riches’ share of UK wealth was at its lowest between 1974 and 1976 (pp.202-3). This popularised history sees the 80s as a rejection of socialism, social democracy and the social. In its place, was the individual, privatisation, the corporate and the Yuppie. Think Pretty in Pink, Dynasty and Miami Vice and the privatisation of listening with the Walkman (p.241, p.262).

The same was seen in music; an over the top, enthusiastic sense of positivity and individualism that coerced you to be free. Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ insists we are ‘rising up, straight to the top’ whilst Spandau Ballet monetised everything by commanding us to remember ‘Always believe that you are gold’ (p.241). The protestant work ethic was back and was sexy, with Madonna’s ‘Holiday’ just ‘one day out of life’ as life is work and work is life. Principles were out; as Culture Club sang ‘I am man without conviction’, conformity was in, whilst Belinda Carlisle reminded us that ‘Heaven is a place on Earth’.

Yet within this golden edifice, music and culture were growing in the cracks of the structure. Film saw Blade Runner, Mad Max, Beyond Thunderdome and 1984, offering a very different view. Music saw the Jam presenting us with the choice ‘to either cut down on beer or the kid’s new gear’ in ‘A Town Called Malice’ (p.248); The Pogues in their rambling ‘Rum, Sodomy and Lash’ gave us songs of the disposed; Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel gave us ‘The Message’: ‘You’ll grow in the ghetto, living second rate/ And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate’ (p.249). Alienation is clearly expressed in the cold, hard musical landscape of ‘Underpass’ on the dystopian ‘Metamatic’ by John Foxx, which offers a ‘satire of a clinical business environment’ (p.231).

In the USA, Bruce Springsteen gave us the pared back anger of ‘Nebraska’ and the terrible sense of loss of a better world and anger against the treatment of veterans on ‘Born in the USA’. This yearning for a collective, socialised past gives the lie to the shiny, individualised world of the 1980s. Whilst Depeche Mode’s industrial sounds on ‘Everything Counts’ capture alienation and lament the ‘collective loss in individualism’ (p.256) with the chorus of ‘The grabbing hands/ Grab all they can/ All for themselves, after all’.

Whilst the right-wing politicians of the 1980s looked to their golden past of the 1950s, the right wing of today looks to the 1980s. They want to write that history as a history of economic success and individual freedom. Yet beneath this gilded veneer, lies a music and politics of protest from the miners’ strike to Billy Bragg’s ‘Between the Wars’ and Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up that Hill’ (recently brought back to the charts via Stranger Things). Defeats may have been experienced during these eras, but they were also times of possibilities, of change, and of potential. Music has the ‘power to evoke and to inspire desire—feelings, dreams, hopes and that is power’ (p.465). History does not have to repeat itself.

‘Fight the Power’
We are lost in music. It comes at us from everywhere and we don’t listen to it chronologically. It surrounds us, ‘whether in a shop or a hipster café, coming from a phone on a bus or a muscle car on the street, heard in a film soundtrack or on a TikTok’ (p.456). However, the author argues that music does not ‘transcend its historical period’, rather it ‘testifies to its historical period’ (p.457). It offers us collective memory, and a collective memory of hope and the potential of change. Watch and listen to Public Enemy’s equal parts ‘rally, party, and revolution’ (p.462) or the Beloved’s ‘Sweet Harmony’ utopian pledge to ‘come together, right now, oh yeah, in sweet harmony’ or Stormzy’s pledge ‘to find a way/ To another day’ on ‘Blinded by Your Grace, Pt.2’.

This history is a history worth telling and a history worth reading. It gives a detailed voice to dissent and challenges the monochrome history of culture told by neoliberal apologists. Perhaps it needed a greater analysis of rave’s potential as a music and mass movement that threatened individualism, private property and the ‘Hip to be Square’ world view of the 1980s. Perhaps the language should have been more open and less technical, however these are minor quibbles in a great book. You and I might not agree with all the musical choices, or all the analysis, but it will challenge your view and I welcome its voice.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/25/mixing- ... ok-review/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Oct 07, 2024 4:39 pm

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Meta Is Aggressively Censoring Criticism Of US-Israeli Warmongering

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.

Caitlin Johnstone
October 7, 2024

I am at risk of getting banned from both Instagram and Facebook as both Meta-owned platforms keep censoring my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon, placing strikes on my accounts in the process.

Both Facebook and Instagram have deleted screenshots of a post I made on Twitter (or whatever you call it now) which reads as follows:

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.

In the reasons given for this censorship, both Facebook and Instagram said “It looks like you shared symbols, praise or support of people and organizations we define as dangerous, or followed them.”

My appeals against this removal have been denied, saying the post “does not follow our Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.”

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Hours later, Instagram removed a second post citing the same reasons, this one about Lebanon and Hezbollah. It was two screenshots from a longer Twitter post which reads as follows:

Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of “liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah” like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.

The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about “terrorists” or “evil dictators” or “regimes” in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.

If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.

It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.


As you can see, both of these posts are just criticisms of the foreign policy of the United States, the nation where Meta is based. Meta has an extensive history of working hand in glove with the US government to regulate speech.

This is indistinct from government censorship. If the US government designates its enemies as “terrorists” and massive Silicon Valley platforms are censoring criticism of US wars against those enemies in order to be in compliance with US law, then the US government is just censoring speech which criticizes US warmongering, using a corporate proxy in Silicon Valley.


Meta has been ramping up censorship of speech that’s critical of Israel and its US-backed atrocities for a while now, with a sharp increase that was anecdotally noticeable immediately after the company announced back in July that it would be instituting vague new censorship protocols against the word “Zionism”. After that move, critics of US foreign policy like Aaron Maté, Jonathan Cook, and Tadhg Hickey began reporting that their posts about Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza were being unexpectedly taken down on Facebook.

I also had one of my articles which was critical of Israel removed from Facebook in July, which the platform refused to reinstate. This followed other acts of censorship that Facebook has been imposing on my account since last October, all for my criticisms of Israel’s US-backed atrocities in Gaza.

Last November Facebook deleted a Twitter screenshot from my page which read, “You don’t understand man, Hamas uses human shields. Really really advanced human shields, the kind where there aren’t even any Hamas members anywhere near them. It’s just 100% human shield with 0% combatant, the most secure kind of shield there is.”


Last January Facebook deleted a post which read as follows:

Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”

This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural homegrown emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.


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This is all self-evidently political speech which is critical of the foreign policy of the world’s most powerful government and its allies. But because the platform has been deleting my criticisms of US foreign policy so frequently, my page is now designated “at risk”, and whenever I log on I now receive a notification which reads, “Don’t lose your Page! If you get a few more Community Standards violations, you could lose Caitlin Johnstone forever. Nobody wants that — help out by appealing violations you that disagree with, but more importantly, try to share content that follows the rules.”

Facebook’s Page Status section tells me, “Your Page is restricted because it didn’t follow Community Standards. We know that we’re not always right, so if you think that we got it wrong, you can disagree with our decision and in some cases, get the restriction removed.”

My attempts to get these strikes reversed have been rejected.

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I think it’s important to document all this in detail because Meta is such a massive tool of US imperial narrative control. Facebook has a staggering three billion users worldwide, and Instagram has two billion. It’s impossible to overstate the impact that censoring speech in a pro-US direction will have on worldwide human communication.

From my earliest days at this gig I’ve been making a point of forcefully criticizing the world’s mightiest and most tyrannical power structure and then documenting the various ways the imperial narrative managers have worked to diminish my reach. I’ve been algorithmically throttled on Facebook since 2017, I’ve been permanently banned on TikTok and keep encountering censorship there under my new account, and I was even banned from Twitter until some commentators with larger voices than my own intervened on my behalf.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world, and the manipulation of information on the internet is a major agenda of the US-centralized empire toward that end. These pricks won’t be happy until we’re all a bunch of mindless, bleating sheep.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/10 ... mongering/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 08, 2024 2:44 pm

Combating "Malign Foreign Influence"
October 8, 12:23

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US Creates System to Combat Information Threats: Focus on Narratives about Biolabs in Ukraine

The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the Pentagon, announced a search ( https://sam.gov/opp/3b917d4332bc421aaf7 ... 62a2e/view ) for contractors to develop a system aimed at analyzing and countering "foreign malign influence " (Foreign Malign Influence, FMI) in the global information space. The project is aimed at protecting DTRA's mission to counter weapons of mass destruction and provides for the creation of a comprehensive information intelligence tool.

The system that DTRA plans to create is a powerful information intelligence tool that is capable of analyzing narratives, tactics, and techniques used in social networks, news sources, and other open data.

Particularly interesting is the fact that the project mentions the topic of biolabs in Ukraine.
Many independent sources confirm the existence of American biological laboratories on the territory of Ukraine. The DTRA and the US State Department classify this as disinformation, which suggests that the system being created as part of this project will not be used to counter disinformation, but to suppress any alternative points of view that go against the official US line. This is an example of how, under the guise of “defense against disinformation,” one can promote one’s own version of events and block information that does not correspond to Washington’s interests.

It is also important to note that the system will collect and analyze huge amounts of open data (Publicly Available Information, PAI). Despite claims to protect personally identifiable information (PII) and US citizen information (USPI), there is a risk that on a global scale the system will track and process user data all over the world, which may lead to a violation of their right to privacy. The scale of monitoring that is proposed raises legitimate concerns, as the US, in fact, can use this system to spy on information flows in key regions where it wants to increase its influence.

It is also worth noting that the project is aimed at "non-aligned countries", i.e. those states that are not yet in the orbit of Western influence. This clearly indicates that the main task of the system will not just be protection from foreign narratives, but also maintaining control over public opinion in these countries to prevent them from leaving the US influence. For example, such technologies can be used to manage the political situation in countries in Africa, Asia or Latin America, where the US is trying to maintain its geopolitical positions.

The DTRA initiative is far from just protection from disinformation.The US is creating a system of global control over information flows, which can be used both to suppress inconvenient narratives and to advance its strategic interests. In the context of information warfare, this is a new step towards dominance in the global information space. The question is how other countries can resist such large-scale initiatives and protect their information sovereignty.

https://t.me/darpaandcia - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9427057.html

The Problem of the Wrong Finger
October 8, 10:04

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Forbes writes that after Hurricane Helen, fakes created with the help of generative AI began to actively spread on social networks.
One of the most discussed images is a realistic AI photo ( https://t.me/russian_osint ) of a child with a puppy.

Image

According to the author of the article, ( https://t.me/russian_osint)such images ( https://t.me/russian_osint)even facilitate cyberattacks: users encounter ( https://t.me/russian_osint)phishing ( https://t.me/russian_osint)links and fraudulent fundraisers to support victims.

If you look closely at the hand of a non-existent child, ( https://t.me/russian_osint)you can see AI hallucinations in the form of a strange finger.

@Russian_OSINT - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9426912.html

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 10, 2024 2:48 pm

Active Measures: Grayzone Journalist & US Citizen Jeremy Loffredo Arrested by Israel
October 9, 2024 natyliesb



YouTube link here.

Below is an interview of Aaron Mate by Judge Napolitano that discusses this issue as well.



YouTube link here.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/10/act ... by-israel/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 11, 2024 2:21 pm

Social Media Beyond Corporate Control
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 09 Oct 2024

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Social media bans on African Stream should remind us that corporations will never facilitate anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist narratives and stir us to look for alternatives.

Several weeks ago African Stream joined the growing list of content creators banned on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), on crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, and even on payment- processing platforms like Stripe and Paypal. Stripe and all the major social media platforms except X have banned African Stream.

This is no surprise because corporations are ultimately not going to facilitate serious anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist narratives beyond the point of managed dissent. It seems naive that some of us may have imagined otherwise, however briefly. I asked Media Alliance Executive Director and privacy expert Tracy Rosenberg whether any social media platform can evade corporate control.

ANN GARRISON: Social media, especially X, formerly Twitter, have become the public square, so much so that President Joe Biden even announced his decision to step down on X. However, X and all the rest of the major platforms are owned by billionaires and huge corporations, who will never allow them to be used to organize revolutionary change, as is evidenced by African Stream’s removal from most major platforms. Is there any way out?

TRACY ROSENBERG: If people genuinely feel that they don't want their public square mediated by billionaires and corporations, there's no choice other than a distributed ownership model like Mastodon .

AG: Mastodon has a tiny installed user base of only 8 million, with 1.4 million active monthly, compared to Twitter, which has, according to some sources, as many as 600 million active users. Estimates of Twitter's user base actually vary widely, but they're all well into the hundreds of millions.

TR: It’s true that Mastodon’s user base is tiny compared to Twitter’s or that of the other big networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. However, I’m a little sanguine about the actual numbers on those networks. On Twitter, it is abundantly clear that the platform is overrun with bots, burner accounts, and garbage posters. Sometimes we focus on numbers instead of meaningful engagement.

I honestly get more significant feedback and engagement nowadays on Mastodon even though I have only about one-third of the follower count there than I have on Twitter. A lot of my Twitter posts don’t get shown to many people, despite my follower count, and many of the replies I do get are antagonistic garbage. So we need to think about this in ways that are not just quantity, but also quality. On Mastodon I have far fewer followers but I’ve had far more meaningful interactions with other users.

AG: Twitter audience is also largely for sale in that you can pay to promote posts up to whatever your budget will allow, right?

TR: Yes, and this generally isn’t true on a distributed ownership model.

AG: Are there any significant distributed ownership platforms other than Mastodon?

TR: Blue Sky is supposed to incorporate that kind of model, but so far they haven’t. I am not aware of any other decentralized social media platforms.

AG: Could you explain what a “distributed ownership model” like Mastondon’s is? Who owns it and what does it mean, concretely, that they own it?

TR: The big social media companies like X and Facebook contain and control their platforms on a central server, aka a computer or collection of computers.

Mastodon operates instead on an interconnected set of individual and independent server computers controlled by different people that are interoperable, meaning they can talk to one another whether they’re in San Francisco or Shanghai.

AG: What makes them “interoperable”?

TR: Interoperability means that accounts or users on totally different server computers can all talk to all of the other server computers. For example, if you have an account on “Twitter” and that account is disabled, then you can’t see or interact with any other Twitter accounts. You have been centrally disabled. In Mastodon, you can just move to another individual server and you are back in the Mastodon network and can see and communicate with any other Mastodon account.

AG: OK, continue.

TR: Users log onto Mastodon on one of these many servers, aka computers, all of which are owned by different people, but then they can talk to anyone else who is logged onto Mastodon anywhere in the world.

Therefore information on Matodon is not centrally contained and controlled, and your interactions with the Mastodon community are not subject to disabling, banning, or deprioritizing in any meaningful way.

AG: OK, I want to try and get very concrete again. Let’s imagine there are 100,000 computer users who put their computers into service as Mastodon servers, meaning that they let other people access the Mastodon network by logging onto the Mastodon network on their computers. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that 80 Mastodon users access the platform on each of these 100,000 servers and that adds up to the 8 million Mastodon users capable of talking to one another. I know there’s nothing that precise going on, but is that a fair description of how Mastodon works?

TR: Yes.

AG: When I set up a Mastodon account, it didn’t say that it was assigning me to any particular server—say, to the home computer operated by Joe Smith in Saskatoon, or whomever wherever. So how did I wind up accessing Mastodon through that person’s server?

TR: You likely signed up at joinmastodon.org , which is the user friendly interface. It encourages you to join mastodon.social which is the largest server and unless you actively click “pick another server,” you will just open an account at mastodon.social. This helps people get on Mastodon without being paralyzed by a multitude of server choices before they even get started.

Someone who sets up an individual Mastodon server is likely to be setting up a community of interest, i.e., technology, art, birds, or whatever their particular interest is. That means that posts about that particular interest will appear when you log on through that server.

If you simply signed up to mastodon.social, no particular content will be favored, but you can then search for content or individuals and build your own communities.

AG: What is “the largest server”? Is it a single computer controlled by a single person? How many of Mastodon’s eight million plus users are on it? And, if most people log onto this largest server, isn’t the network largely contained and controlled by its owner?

TR: Mastodon.social was the first one and it is still the biggest, so if people don’t have a better idea, they end up there. It is somewhere between 1 and 2 million users and goes up and down. It is just one server node on the Mastodon network. You don’t need to have an account on Mastodon.social to reach or talk to all the people with accounts there, so no, it is not contained or controlled. You could have your own server of one, and if it is interoperated with Mastodon—what the network calls “federated”—then you can reach all the people on mastodon.social.

AG: How does content moderation work on Mastodon or similar networks? When I signed up, I was notified of community standards like not posting racist, ageist, homophobic, or xenophobic content and not inciting violence.

TR: Every single server or node on the network has an owner, and that owner is responsible for any moderation on their server. Most servers will provide moderation guidelines that they present to new accounts. They’ll tell you what they moderate, if anything, and why.

The server you probably joined, mastodon.social, has very conventional community standards that are pretty similar to what any corporate social media network would put out. There are also some out there that are considerably more strict or considerably more laissez-faire. If you don’t like the moderation you are being subjected to on a particular server, you can leave and join from another server while still being in and on Mastodon.

AG: That seems like a very large difference—that content moderation is not centrally controlled. African Stream, for example, would be able to move from a server that banned it to another that won’t while remaining on the Mastodon network. Is that correct?

TR: Yes.

AG: Presumably someone thrown off of one server for posting racist, ageist, homophobic, or xenophobic content, or inciting violence, could move from one server to another too, no?

TR: Yes. On the negative side, moderation by server owners is largely a volunteer effort, so it can sometimes be inconsistent or fall behind.

AG: Members of the Western political elite have been saying for years that social media is dangerously out of control. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, former Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said that it needs to be censored and brought under control in order to build consensus, especially in democracies. He also said that the First Amendment is in the way.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that RT and other Kremlin propaganda like African Stream need to be brought under control, and shortly thereafter all the major platforms except X banned African Stream. Elon Musk is a champion of free speech who promotes X as a free speech zone, and he didn’t ban it, but we can’t expect him to ultimately tolerate speech that is imminently challenging his inordinate power.

Do you think that elites will ultimately try to come after Mastodon or any similar platforms if they become a serious threat, and are these platforms beyond their reach?

TR: I think there are a couple things going on in your statement. There is a legitimate problem with bots and troll farms distributing blatant misinformation on social media sites. I think society does have some legitimate interest in cracking down on things like, for example, telling people polling places in Black neighborhoods are closed when they aren’t.

The purpose of public debate is to air conflicting views and, yes, build consensus, and there is an element of good faith involved in that process or it doesn’t work. You end up with polarization, as we have because people are exchanging differing sets of facts, not differing opinions about the same set of facts.

Then there is the question of the bounds of acceptable debate, managed dissent, and the interests of governments in uniting people behind an agenda. Journalists sometimes act as “stenographers of power,” collaborating with governments in this way, and elites do want to make social media platforms do the same. Social media platforms are clearly messier and more difficult to control.

It isn’t a question of the Kremlin or not the Kremlin. The Russian and Chinese governments do everything the US government does on the platforms commonly used in their countries. Governments are going to try to control what they think are dangerous ideas, and most governments perceive anti-imperialist narratives or economic redistribution narratives or anti-nationalist narratives as dangerous.

But if a social media platform is decentralized, what can governments actually do? If they pressure one server owner to take their server down, another pops up. There is no corporate entity to pressure. Not much you can do but counter-propagandize.

AG: Is Mastodon more of an English language platform, and if so, can it accommodate other languages as the big platforms can?

TR: There are lots of Mastodon users in Germany, speaking German, and the network can accommodate any written language.

AG: Do Mastodon and any similar platforms have limitations in Africa, where most internet access by far is via cell phones?

TR: For individual posters, no. There are phone apps for using Mastodon. I use one called “Tusky.” But for servers (host computers), you generally need more computing power, and limited broadband can impact the number of servers in a country and that can limit the vitality of the online conversations in and about that country. Not real interesting if African issues are literally invisible in an online community and you’re African, so you need a variety of African servers for it to be viable.

AG: Meaning that Africans who set up Mastodon servers are likely to be creating African communities of interest, and with fewer personal computers and less broadband, there will be fewer African communities of interest created. Is that correct?

TR: Yes.

AG: Why do you think Mastodon has failed to grow a larger user base?

TR: Mastodon does not provide an algorithmic feed. Social media users are used to trying to game the algorithm to “go viral.” When that isn’t in play, and all you can do is connect with people who want to connect with you, many people lose interest. On the big platforms they get hooked on the dopamine rush of likes, shares, and followers.

AG: I understand the dopamine rush, but can you explain the algorithmic feed?

TR: An algorithmic feed is a machine-learning formula that every corporate social media platform uses to try to show you content that it thinks interests you in the hopes of keeping you there generating clicks and responses from you that the platform can use to develop a more detailed profile of you to sell to advertisers.

Going “viral” is largely a function of having your post picked up by an algorithmic feed as engaging (which can also mean gruesome, outrageous, disgusting, tragic etc.), meaning a large percentage of the people who saw it were engaged by it. A post that is gathering engagement on its own may then be shown to you even though the platform’s algorithmic feeds have never indicated that it would engage you in the hopes that it will.

Thus, if you do engage with something in an algorithmically determined feed (like “for you” in Twitter), you somewhat unwittingly throw that content into other people’s algorithmic feeds and keep it circulating. Which is why we all make things like Twitter worse for everyone when we engage with trolls and bots. The purpose of a feed displayed by an algorithm, and the social media companies spend a lot of time tweaking and perfecting these algorithms, is to keep you clicking, liking, and sharing for as long as possible and to allow the companies to extract as much information about your preferences, interests, politics, health, associations, hobbies, and so on as they can sell. Surveillance capitalism uses artificial intelligence to facilitate data extraction at scale from corporate social media platforms.

AG: If a significant anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist user base were to emerge on Mastodon, would there be levels of physical, infrastructural control that might take it down?

TR: The entire internet operates on wires, cables, and fiber lines that are owned by a couple of companies. The backbone is undersea cables. Satellite is currently only used for satellite internet services and military uses. Satellite is a very small portion of commercial internet usage.

On a root level, the entire internet, not just social media, is vulnerable to some degree. Obviously, government itself runs on the internet as well, so switching off the undersea cables would have catastrophic ramifications, but you can’t say it’s impossible.

To suspend, expel, or shadow ban individual users or sets of users generally requires a centralized operation like Twitter, not a distributed one like Mastodon.

However, when payment systems are involved, there really isn’t a distributed model, so going after access to payment systems like Stripe, which suspended African Stream, is still possible.

So, is Mastodon protected from the root internet system? Of course not. But it is protected from the random corporate assaults that we see on a day-to-day basis. Like the other little things we use to mitigate harm—the TOR browser, VPNs, turning off location data when we don’t need it, using “do not track” mechanisms, etc., they don’t solve all the problems, but they reduce the personal harms we experience from extractive data systems.

AG: Is Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency a possibility for supporting sites like African Stream?

TR: The premise of cryptocurrency is yes. The entire purpose of the cryptocurrency movement, in its purest sense, is a distributed method of currency that doesn’t rely on, and cannot be shut down by, central banks. In practice, cryptocurrency has been highly volatile and hard to use, so it is more of a potential use case. But the potential is there and that is the idea.

Crime is another thing that needs to be financed outside the control of the central banking system. That is why cryptocurrency has been so heavily used in criminal activity.

AG: How might decentralized platforms like Mastodon impact social media consumption?

TR: They have the potential to break some of the addiction to algorithms and virality that hook us to the big corporate platforms. Mastodon is slower, but it holds the promise of being more real, and, in the end, what we need for a meaningful anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist movement isn’t a million likes or a million follows, but a meaningful exchange of information that powers action and builds relationships.

AG: Tracy Rosenberg, thanks for speaking to Black Agenda Report.

TR: You’re welcome.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 12, 2024 2:56 pm

Paragon Spyware Successfully Legalized in the US
October 10, 19:15

Image

Paragon Spyware Successfully Legalized in the US

As Wired reports ( https://www.wired.com/story/ice-paragon ... -contract/ ), the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a $2 million contract to Israeli company Paragon Solutions, which specializes in ( https://t.me/russian_osint ) spyware. The one-year contract, signed on September 27, includes “a fully configured proprietary solution, including ( https://t.me/russian_osint) licenses , hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.”

Paragon received the order under ( https://t.me/russian_osint)FAR 6.302-1 (part of the Federal Acquisition Regulation), intended for unique and innovative services not otherwise available to the government.

As noted, this is not the first contract ( https://t.me/russian_osint)Paragon has with U.S. government agencies. In December 2022, The New York Times reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had misused the company's product called "Graphite," a spyware program capable of extracting data from cloud backups.

The ICE contract comes amid the Biden administration's aggressive push to reform the commercial spyware market. The measures include adding companies like NSO Group ( https://t.me/russian_osint ) and Intellexa to the Entity List, imposing visa restrictions, and sanctioning individuals associated with the development and sale of such software.

Notable fact: Paragon positions itself ( https://t.me/russian_osint ) as an "ethical" spyware maker. The company's U.S. website says it provides customers with "ethics-based tools," and one investor claims Paragon's software "makes the world a safer place." The company boasts of working with ( https://t.me/russian_osint) law enforcement and intelligence agencies in 39 countries that meet the standards of “enlightened democracy.”

Founded in 2019 by veterans of Israel’s 🇮🇱🎖 “Unit 8200” intelligence unit, Paragon has attracted investment from American venture capital firms Battery Ventures and Blumberg Capital. According to experts, the lack of sanctions against Paragon by the Biden administration may indicate the company’s successful lobbying efforts. Wired claims that in 2019, Paragon hired consulting firm WestExec Advisors to advance its interests, ( https://t.me/russian_osint) co-founded by current US 🇺🇸 Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Forbes previously wrote (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew ... nd-signal/ ), that according to Paragon, its technology is aimed at accessing only ❗️ specific applications, and not full control over the device. This is how it differs from NSO Group.

The company was founded in 2019 by former Israeli intelligence officers, including Ehud Schneorsohn, the former commander of Unit 8200. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was also on the board of directors.

@Russian_OSINT - zinc

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 17, 2024 3:00 pm

Censorship, War Propaganda and Fascism
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 16 Oct 2024

Image
Shaban al-Dalou and his mother were burned to death when Israeli bombs struck the refugee hospital where he was a patient. Photo courtesy of the al-Dalou family

The U.S. edges closer to hot war and continues aiding and abetting a genocide. Censorship and war propaganda are necessary tools when a rogue state chooses to silence its opponents.

The F-word of the moment is fascism. Establishment pundits, Democratic Party politicians, and corporate media are of one accord and agree that a Donald Trump presidency will bring fascism to the United States. All of them ignore the authoritarian nature of the state that already exists and the actions taken to date which can accurately be described as fascistic.

On October 13, the same day that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) bombed refugees at the Al-Aqsa Hospital and burned patients alive, the U.S. announced it was sending troops to Israel to man the THAAD missile system which will be used in the imminent attack on Iran. Congress has not approved such a deployment. Most citizens of the U.S. are unaware that their government has chosen to fulfill Israel’s long held fantasy of attacking Iran with U.S. help or that the repercussions could lead to a wider regional war with other nations.

Only avid social media users who know good sources of information were aware that the IDF incinerated sick refugees, including 19-year-old Sha'ban al-Dalou and his mother. Only defeated and soon-to-be former Congresswoman Cori Bush dared to say plainly what Israel had done, setting fire to people in hospital beds. Her colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , who once declared that Kamala Harris was working “tirelessly” on a ceasefire agreement, is now demanding that Biden and Harris begin an arms embargo on Israel. Of course, Harris has said she is opposed to an arms embargo. If the woman known as AOC was serious she would rescind her endorsement of Harris, but as she epitomizes the unserious politician, no such stance has or will be taken.

In order to prevent the public from reading or viewing or listening to independent media, the State Department has sanctioned Russian-based outlets such as Radio Sputnik . Its programs ceased to operate as of October 15. Secretary of State Blinken accused African Stream of being a “Russian asset” and the site was immediately banned from YouTube and Meta, had its Google account closed, and was prevented from using Stripe to conduct financial transactions. Even small audiences are too large when there is fog of war to be carried out and information to be hidden from the people.

Not only was Sputnik targeted but both the U.S. and Canada have sanctioned the organization Samidoun Prisoner Solidarity Support Network, making it unable to conduct any financial transactions and, in effect, ending its ability to operate. The trumped-up charge was that Samidoun is a “sham,” a “front” organization for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The setup doesn’t work unless a connection with an organization designated as “terrorist” is alleged. Now an internationally respected organization is destroyed so that opposition to Israeli war crimes can be silenced.

Like clockwork, the Russiagate scam has been dusted off and resurrected when needed at an opportune moment. Kamala Harris declared that, “We know there is foreign interference,” and added for good measure, “I was part of the Senate Intelligence Committee when we investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Black folks were targeted with misinformation.” For now, we have been spared her contention that Russian operatives were responsible for the controversy surrounding Colin Kaepernick’s protest, which brought attention to police killings in this country.

The giant elephant in the room is Palestine and now Lebanon and the bipartisan determination to support the zionist project after nearly 200,000 people have been killed by bombs, starvation, and illness in Palestine alone. Lebanon is the next target for regime change. The U.S. special envoy, Amos Hochstein , said as much in a Freudian slip: “Once we elect, select, once Lebanon selects a new president.” Hochstein’s title is Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs but he is Biden’s pointman who gave the go-ahead for the invasion of Lebanon. He also happens to have been born in Israel and served in the IDF himself. So much for impartiality.

The outcome of the presidential election hinges on whether or not Biden and Harris have the courage to even pretend that they will enforce a ceasefire or an arms embargo. Thousands of people, enough to change the outcome in battleground swing states, have vowed not to vote for Harris unless the killing stops. So far, she can only muster meaningless entreaties : “The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks. Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need.” Israel is deliberately withholding food. Starvation is a weapon of war. For now, the Biden administration has given Israel 30 days to increase humanitarian aid with "... an implicit warning that the United States could curtail or halt those shipments." Of course, the deadline date is after the presidential election, which means the two countries are colluding, as Israel wants to use the time before Election Day to kill more people. Biden knows this and presents a ruse as some sort of breakthrough.

No one has to anticipate fascism should Trump win the election. It is the Democratic Party that has carried out a genocide, censored information about it, pressured the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice to ignore obvious war crimes, and indulged in pretense about ending the carnage. It is Joe Biden who is about to embroil the U.S. in a war with Iran and its allies. Biden has prevented U.S. citizens from accessing the information they choose to seek out, the way that dictatorships do. No one has to look abroad or wait for Trump to see an authoritarian state. It is staring us in the face and will continue regardless of who is the next president of this country unless the people stop them.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 18, 2024 2:12 pm

Image

More Authoritarian Crackdowns On Speech That’s Critical Of Israel

British “counterterrorism” police raided the home of Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley on Thursday morning, seizing multiple electronic devices on suspicion that the journalist violated the UK’s 2006 Terrorism Act with his social media activity.

Caitlin Johnstone
October 18, 2024

British “counterterrorism” police raided the home of Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley on Thursday morning, seizing multiple electronic devices on suspicion that the journalist violated the UK’s 2006 Terrorism Act with his social media activity.

The Electronic Intifada is an independent outlet which focuses on Palestinian rights and the abuses of apartheid Israel. It has spent the last year publishing critical journalism that has later been vindicated by more mainstream outlets questioning empire propaganda on issues like the “mass rape” hoax and Israel’s implementation of the Hannibal Directive on October 7. Winstanley has been a major contributor to this journalism.

The Electronic Intifada reports:

“British counterterrorism police on Thursday raided the home and seized several electronic devices belonging to The Electronic Intifada’s associate editor Asa Winstanley.

“Approximately 10 officers arrived at Winstanley’s North London home before 6 am and served the journalist with warrants and other papers authorizing them to search his house and vehicle for devices and documents.

“A letter addressed to Winstanley from the ‘Counter Terrorism Command’ of the Metropolitan Police Service indicates that the authorities are ‘aware of your profession’ as a journalist but that ‘notwithstanding, police are investigating possible offenses’ under sections 1 and 2 of the Terrorism Act (2006). These provisions set out the purported offense of ‘encouragement of terrorism.’

“An officer conducting Thursday’s raid informed Winstanley that the investigation was connected with the journalist’s social media posts. Attempts to reach the Metropolitan Police Service for comment for this story have been unsuccessful.

“Although his devices were seized, Winstanley was not arrested and has not been charged with any offense.”


“The amount of authoritarianism and erosion of rights in the West to protect Israel — by censoring criticism of that foreign country and punishing its critics — is almost impossible to overstate,” journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted on the news of the police raid, adding, “Mass firings in the US and speech-restricting laws. The UK, as always, is worse.”

As soon as the British government gave itself the right to designate targets of British warmongering as “terrorists” and then made it a speech crime to support those “terrorists”, it became inevitable we’d start seeing British journalists persecuted for criticizing their government’s foreign policy.

Basically what we’re seeing with the police raid on Asa Winstanley is the west finally reconciling (A) its need to suppress speech that’s critical of western warmongering with (B) its stated support for free speech. All it has to do is outlaw speech that can be deemed supportive of “terrorism” while designating the targets of western warmongering like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorists”.

This maneuver allows the western empire to stomp out critical speech about western foreign policy in a way that can be framed as reasonable, because obviously we can’t have people encouraging terrorism! That would be tantamount to shouting “fire” in a crowded theater — which we seem to have arbitrarily decided is the line where free speech must end.

We’re seeing the UK spearhead this initiative over the past year, with “counterterrorism” police persecuting journalists like Winstanley and Richard Medhurst and activists like Mick Napier, Tony Greenstein, Richard Barnard and Sarah Wilkinson, but we’re seeing similar iterations sprout up throughout the western world. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have been increasingly censoring speech that they deem supportive of “dangerous individuals and organisations” like Hamas and Hezbollah, and here in Australia police are investigating protesters for waving Hezbollah flags at a demonstration in Melbourne under a new law banning the public display of symbols of designated “terrorist” groups.


Ever since 2016 we’ve seen western empire managers publicly wringing their hands and fretting about the disadvantage the western world has in the information age because of its laws supporting free expression which allow the enemies of western governments to spread “propaganda” and “disinformation” to westerners. In its increasing criminalization of any speech which can be interpreted as supportive of designated terrorist organizations, they’ve found a major loophole which allows them to rein in the highly democratized freedoms of expression that westerners have been enjoying with widespread internet access and begin regaining their ability to control how westerners think, speak, act, and vote.

Earlier this year we saw Palantir CEO Alex Karp come right out and say that if western anti-genocide protesters are allowed to win the public debate, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.

“We kind of just think these things that are happening, across college campuses especially, are like a sideshow — no, they are the show,” Karp said during a conference in May. “Because if we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the west, ever.”

For those who don’t know, Palantir is a CIA-backed surveillance and data mining tech company with intimate ties to both the US intelligence cartel and to Israel, playing a crucial role in both the US empire’s sprawling surveillance network and Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. Karp is a billionaire who sits on the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group and regularly features at the World Economic Forum and other platforms of plutocratic empire management.

We saw this imperial hand-wringing illustrated again this past May in a conversation between Senator Mitt Romney and Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the McCain Institute, during which both acknowledged some facts that generally go unstated by such empire managers.

After bemoaning Israel’s lack of success at “PR” regarding its Gaza assault, Romney just came right out and said that this was “why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature” — with “us” meaning himself and his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill.


“How this narrative has evolved, yeah, it’s a great question,” Blinken responded, saying that at the beginning of his career in Washington everyone was getting their information from television and physical newspapers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

“Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond,” Blinken continued. “And of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t — we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything.

This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories — narratives — that people tell themselves about their reality.

They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans.

They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people think about what happens.

They understand that whoever controls the narrative controls the world.


That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood, and it’s what’s going on with the police crackdowns we are seeing on journalists and activists in the UK. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives, and they are conducting themselves accordingly.

Our rulers don’t think about things like normal people think about them. They don’t think in terms of doing the right thing or acting in a way that benefits everyone. They don’t think in terms of truth and honesty or the lack thereof. They only think in terms of what stories people are telling each other, and how those stories can be changed in a way that advances the interests of the empire they manage.

Empire managers — and highly manipulative people in general — do not use language in the way that normal people use it. Normal human beings use language to connect and communicate, whereas manipulators use it only to extract things they want from people and exert control over them. They do this by working to control the narratives that people have about their material reality.

That’s why when guys like Romney and Blinken talk to each other about why people are so upset at Israel, it never even occurs to them to discuss how Israel’s public image is being hurt by its own actions, or to suggest that it could improve that image by simply ceasing to behave in a monstrous way. All they talk about is “the narrative” of what Israel is doing, and how people having the ability to share ideas and information with each other online makes that narrative harder to control.


So while normal people are looking at the bloodshed and horror in Gaza and Lebanon and screaming it needs to stop at the top of our lungs, our rulers are hearing us and thinking, “Oh no, we need to find a way to get them to stop believing that narrative and get them to believe another one.”

That’s what we’re seeing with all the attempts to stomp out free speech both at demonstrations and online. They understand that if they lose control of the narrative, they won’t be able to deploy their armies anymore.

So please don’t make the mistake of thinking your attempts to disrupt their narrative control aren’t working. Don’t let anyone tell you your protests don’t make a difference or your dissident speech poses no threat to the powerful. If what we’re doing wasn’t working, empire managers wouldn’t be going nuts trying to stop us.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Oct 19, 2024 2:06 pm

How to Do a Conjunctural Analysis: The Forty-Second Newsletter (2024)

Unlike mainstream media, which all too often distorts the truth and lies by omission – as we see with reporting on Palestine, where the death toll has reached 114,000 – conjunctural analyses help us understand the deeper forces at play and provide political and social movements with the materials to intervene to shape the future.

17 October 2024

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Helen Zughaib (Lebanon), Reading Coffee Cups, c. 2021.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Reading legacy Western media – which dominates the world information order – is painful. During the genocidal war against Palestinians, for instance, these media outlets (such as CNN, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Bild) have been unable to bring themselves to describe the Israeli military’s attacks on Palestinians. At most, and when it suits them, they resort to passive voice (‘Palestinians die’) or to a dangerous form of turning civilian areas into military targets (‘Hezbollah village’ or ‘Hamas command and control centre’).

A study of mainstream US print media coverage during the first six weeks of the genocide in Gaza showed that ‘for every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times’. In other words, in mainstream media, an Israeli who dies will be mentioned 16 times more than a Palestinian who dies. This trend, which erases and dehumanises Palestinian casualties, seems to have accelerated as the number of Palestinians killed has increased exponentially, with an estimated 114,000 dead. There is no excuse for this abysmal coverage, which ignores the steady stream of information provided by the live reporting of a large number of Palestinian journalists and social media users in Gaza, at great risk to their lives, as well the deeper context for the US-Israeli occupation, apartheid, and genocidal war provided by a wide range of analysis.

Television programmes are worse, with any critic of the genocide forced to make an admission (‘I condemn the 7 October attack by Hamas’ or ‘I condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine’) before the conversation can proceed, and, since many critics do not want to frame the discussion around this condemnation, the conversation never proceeds. This ritual act of condemnation is not merely an entry ticket into a conversation but an ideological concession that narrows the space for a genuine debate about the facts of when conflicts and crises begin, how to understand the structure of a conflict, and how best to ascertain the paths forward based on this longer-term historical and structural assessment. This type of discussion is called a conjunctural analysis, which provides political and social movements with the materials to intervene to shape the future and grounds the work of our institute. This newsletter will introduce you to four texts that are based on conjunctural analyses, but first I want to explain what such an analysis entails.

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Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), The Field, 2022.

The problem with information these days is not only its content, but equally its form. The velocity of information is striking, making it near impossible for a concerned person to discern both what is significant and what is true. Providing an excess of information that comes without proper, democratic analysis and is almost entirely controlled by a small oligarchy is its own form of censorship, exhausting the reader and viewer into submission. What is censored is not only information itself, although that does occur more than we admit, but also knowledge and wisdom. The news remains at the level of it happened, without explaining most of what happened at all: it does not explain why it happened, what caused it to happen, or its possible consequences. This form of reporting lies by omission, as events are neither static nor singular but part of a complex process.

Conjunctural analyses are an important tool for understanding that complexity, since they seek to explain the dynamic process of history at a certain point in time. Any given point in time is rooted in a past and a future: the past shapes the present, but the present also presages what may come in the future depending on how one intervenes now. That is why conjunctural analyses, derived from a history of Marxist analysis and from the work of the political and social movements that conduct them, are rooted in four principles:

History. Since events do not take place in isolation but are part of a long-term process, there must be a distinction between incidental or occasional events and organic or structural events.
Totality. Events are interconnected. They are part of a complex structure that encompasses various possibilities.
Structure. Events take place within a lattice that includes economic, political, social, and cultural aspects and within which people are organised into classes and power blocs that interact through institutions and ideas.
Politics. Events must be understood in an active way, which means asking how a political force will act to shape the future, rather than passively watching the future unfold. Answering this question requires a close analysis of the nature of class formation, the balance of political forces, and cultural traditions that could advance a certain political agenda.

Our Asia, Africa, and Latin America offices recently published four texts based on conjunctural analyses:

Image

Nepal’s Fight for Sovereignty, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the US’s New Cold War against China, jointly produced with Bampanth magazine and written by its chief editor Dr Mahesh Maskey, who was also Nepal’s ambassador to China. This text is only in English.
A New World Born from the Ashes of the Old, written by Hanna Eid and produced with input from the West African People’s Organisation. This text is only in English.
La criminalización de los cultivadores como coartada imperialista: economía política de las drogas en Colombia (The Criminalisation of Farmers as an Imperialist Alibi: The Political Economy of Drugs in Colombia), jointly researched and produced with Centro de Pensamiento y Diálogo Político and Coordinadora Nacional de Cultivadores de Coca, Amapola y Marihuana in Colombia and written by Karen Jessenia Gutiérrez Alfonso. This text is only in Spanish.
A Revista Estudos do Sul Global (Journal of Global South Studies), which contains articles on themes such as imperialism, the character of finance in our times, and the tempo of the class struggle. This text is only in Portuguese.
I will write about each of these texts at greater length in the coming months, as their depth and quality help us navigate beneath the superficiality and sensationalism that typically define analyses of the present. For instance, Maskey’s intervention about the Nepali government’s acceptance of a US government grant elucidates the dynamic structure of the US-imposed New Cold War on Asia, while Hanna Eid’s assessment of the Alliance of Sahel States (Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) enables us to understand the fight for sovereignty across West Africa as a whole. The report on the war on drugs provides a window into the pressures upon the government of President Gustavo Petro in Colombia, which requires an acknowledgment of the role of the lucrative international drug mafia in the country’s political establishment.


Years ago, I visited the Zacapa barracks, about two hours east of Guatemala City. The scene at the barracks was near-idyllic, its stone walls surrounded by green pastures, yet the sinister watch towers hinted of the bloodshed that took place here: this is where Nora Paiz Cárcamo (1944–1967), Otto René Castillo (1934–1967), other members of the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and about a dozen peasants were brutally tortured and burned alive. Both Nora and Otto were members of the communist movement that fought against the Guatemalan dictatorship; trained in the German Democratic Republic and Soviet Union, respectively; and joined the armed struggle in the Sierra de las Minas (named for the mines of jade, marble, and asbestos), where they were killed in March 1967. Later, Nora’s mother, Clemencia Cárcamo Sandoval, told the truth commission that her daughter’s bloody, fractured corpse was found with clubs fused into it, a sign of how brutally she had been beaten. Two years before he was murdered alongside his comrades, Otto, whose beautiful poems were inspired by the El Salvadoran guerrilla poet Roque Dalton (1935–1975), wrote an elegy to ‘apolitical intellectuals’:

I

One day,
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the humblest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when
their homeland was slowly
extinguished,
like a sweet fire,
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their suits,
or about their long
siestas
after lunch,
or about their sterile
battles with nothingness,
nor about
their ontological
way
of making money.
They won’t be questioned
about Greek mythology,
or about the self-disgust they felt
when someone, deep down,
accepted the fate of dying a coward’s death.
They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of a total lie.

II

On that day
the humble people will come.
Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
yet, every day, brought them
their bread and milk,
their eggs and tortillas,
those who mended their clothes,
who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and tended their gardens,
who worked for them,
and they’ll ask:
‘What did you do when the poor
suffered, when the tenderness and life
was snuffed out of them?’.

III

Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will have nothing to say.

A vulture of silence
will devour your insides.
Your own misery
will gnaw at your soul.
And you will be silent,
ashamed of yourselves.


Warmly,

Vijay

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