Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 01, 2022 4:07 pm

Media Serve the Governors, Not the Governed
NOVEMBER 30, 2022

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Julian Assange speaking from balcony of Ecuador embassy in London, December 2018. File photo.

By Joe Lauria – Nov 24, 2022

[Joe Lauria gave the original version of this speech at a rally for Julian Assange in Sydney on March 3, 2019. The video of the speech can be watched here.]

In his 1971 opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black wrote:

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government’s power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government.

That’s what WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have been doing since 2006: censuring governments with governments’ own words pried from secrecy by WikiLeaks’ sources—whistleblowers. In other words, WikiLeaks has been doing the job the US constitution intended the press to do.

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US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.

One can hardly imagine anyone sitting on today’s US Supreme Court writing such an opinion. Even more troubling is the news media having turned its back on its mission. Today they almost always serve the governors—not the governed.

The question is why.

Consolidation of media ownership has increased obedience of desperate journalists; entertainment divisions have taken over news departments; and careerist reporters and editors live vicariously through the power of those they cover, rejecting the press’ unique power to hold those officials to account.

It comes down ultimately to lifestyles. Men go to war to protect and further their lifestyles. The press cheers them on for residual material betterment and increase in status.

Millions of lives erased for lifestyles.

It used to be accepted in television that news departments would lose money and would be supported by the entertainment division. That’s because news was considered a public service. TV newsmen—they were almost all men in those days—were former wire service and newspaper reporters.

But greed has put the presenters’ personalities before public service, as entertainment masquerades as news. Newspapers have sacrificed investigative units to maximize profit. Government is the winner.

The abdication of the mainstream media of their constitutional responsibility to serve the governed and not the governors has left a void filled for more than a decade by WikiLeaks.

No longer do today’s Daniel Ellsbergs need to take their chances with editors at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or with their reporters spinning the damning information they risk their freedom to get to the public—no matter how disinterested and distracted the public may be.

Now the traditional media can be bypassed. WikiLeaks deals in the raw material, that governments hang themselves with. That’s why they want Assange’s head. They lust for revenge and to stop further leaks that threaten their grip on power.

That the corporate media has turned on Assange and WikiLeaks reveals their service to the state and how much they prioritize their style of life—disregarding the carnage they help bring about.

In that Pentagon Papers’ decision, the majority of the court ruled that the First Amendment prohibited the government from exercising prior restraint—or censorship—on the media before publication of classified information. But the majority of the court also said the government could prosecute journalists after publication.

Indeed the US Espionage Act, which has withstood First Amendment challenges, criminalizes a publisher’s or journalist’s mere possession, as well as dissemination, of classified material. A 1961 amendment to the Act extended US jurisdiction across the world. Assange is threatened by it.

US administrations have been reluctant to take the step of post-publication prosecution, however.

Richard Nixon did not prosecute Sen. Mike Gravel, who was constitutionally protected when he read the Papers, given to him by Ellsberg, into the Congressional record. But Gravel could have been prosecuted for publishing the Papers as a book. (Nixon empaneled a grand jury to indict New York Times reporters for publishing the Papers, but the case fell apart when it emerged that Ellsberg’s phone had been tapped.)

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Joe Lauria and John Pilger at a rally for Assange in Sydney, Australia, March 2019. Photo: Tatiana Schild.

Barack Obama decided to back off Assange when it was plain The New York Times and other corporate media would be as liable as Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified information. The virulently anti-media Trump administration, however, took that step when Assange was arrested.

From their point of view it’s easy to understand why the US wants to crush Assange. But what is Australia’s excuse? Why is it fighting America’s battles? Why has the Australian mainstream media also turned against Assange after an election held in the US, not Australia?

What has happened to Australia’s sovereignty? That’s a question that can be answered by Australians coming into the streets, like today—and staying there until their compatriot is at last free. Free to continue to do the job the media refuses to do.

https://orinocotribune.com/media-serve- ... -governed/

Personally. I never thought Assange's revelations were all that earth shaking, just about all was already known to informed leftists. And he seems a bit of a weirdo. Nonetheless, he did facilitate bringing those revelations to a wider audience, shocking a few of the middle-brow. And as he has become a figurehead of press freedom, we are bound to support and forget the small stuff.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Dec 18, 2022 5:10 pm

The Ruling Class Promotes Identity Politics And ‘Anti-Wokeism’ For The Exact Same Reasons

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It’s an interesting time for culture war red herrings in the shadow of the empire. There are no major electoral races currently underway. Government Covid regulations have been mostly rolled back. The empire is waging an extremely dangerous and continually escalating proxy war with Russia that should be getting a lot of scrutiny. If one didn’t know better one might expect this to be a time when the rank-and-file public would be doing a bit less barking and snarling at one another and a bit more at the people in charge.

But if one is reading this, one probably knows better.

The world is roaring toward multipolarity and the empire is doing everything it can to slam on the brakes, up to and including ramping up for a global confrontation with noncompliant nuclear-armed powers, and meanwhile the public is growing more and more disaffected with stagnant wages and soaring inequality even as concerns grow that we are headed toward environmental collapse.

So of course, at this crucial point in history, they’ve got everyone arguing about “wokeness”.


What “woke” means depends on who you ask. According to the original AAVE definition, it means “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. If you ask Ron DeSantis’ lawyers when they were made to define the term in court, it means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” Both of which sound entirely reasonable.

If you ask members of the rank-and-file right wing, though, the answers range from the incoherent to the insanely bigoted to the profoundly stupid. You’ll hear gibberish about “Cultural Marxism” (not a real thing), about communist conspiracies to give your child puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery, about a liberal plot to normalize child molestation and erase women as a gender, and about the agenda to deteriorate society and plunge western culture into chaos and disorder because it makes Satan happy. In my experience the arguments are often intensely emotional — hysterical, even— yet entirely lacking in substance.

You’ll also run into the occasional good faith actor who sincerely believes “wokeism” needs to be aggressively opposed because the obsession with racial and sexual justice is sucking all the oxygen out of the room for more important matters and being used as a weapon to ram through pernicious power-serving agendas. It’s this category that I am mainly addressing here, because I view the previous category as generally beyond redemption.

It is entirely true that identity politics are being used to ram through establishment-serving agendas and subvert real dissent. We saw a very in-your-face example of this in 2016 with the extremely aggressive push to elect America’s first woman president, when anyone who pointed out her horrifyingly awful track record on things like war and militarism was shouted down as a misogynist. The entire Democratic Party is essentially one big psyop designed to kill any attempt to redress income and wealth inequality, poverty, wars, militarism, money in politics, surveillance, government secrecy, police militarization and every other control mechanism designed to hold the status quo in place, while herding any revolutionary zeitgeist back toward establishment loyalism with false promises to make life better for women and marginalized groups.

But it is also true that pouring your energy into “anti-wokeism” serves the establishment in the exact same way as pouring your energy into identity politics.


Anti-wokeism — if you will permit me a somewhat counterintuitive turn of phrase— is identity politics dressed in drag. Fixation on fighting “wokeness” corrals people into mainstream establishment-serving frameworks in exactly the same way identity politics corrals people into mainstream establishment-serving frameworks. It makes sure the rank-and-file public stays busy barking and snarling at one another instead of the people in charge.

Does it not seem odd to you that half of the ruling class has been getting half of the population to fixate on identity politics while the other half has been getting half the population increasingly panicked about “wokeness”? Does it not seem a little too convenient how all the mainstream right-wing politicians are making anti-wokeism a major part of their platforms, how all the mainstream right-wing pundits are doing everything they can to make their audiences more panicked about how “woke” everything is getting, and how you’ve got Elon Musk talking about “the woke mind virus” in exactly the same way more liberal-aligned oligarchs champion social justice issues?

This is because both anti-wokeism and identity politics serve the same establishment agendas, entirely by design. The more people are fixated on the mainstream culture war, the less likely they are to decide they want to do things like defund the Pentagon or take back everything the rich have stolen from them. Time you’re spending yelling at the other side of the cultural divide is time you’re not spending eating your landlord as God and nature intended.

And of course by saying these things are used in the same way I do not mean to imply that “anti-wokeism” is equal in value to the struggle for social justice. It absolutely is the case that there are disadvantaged groups in our society who do need to be uplifted from where they’re at, and anyone who tries to stop that from happening is plainly in the wrong. What I’m pointing at here, rather, is the way lip service to racial and sexual justice is used to get people supporting a mainstream political faction that never does anything other than facilitate oligarchy, exploitation and imperialism, in precisely the same way right-wing hysteria about “wokeness” is used to do precisely the same thing.


So what is to be done about the culture war we’re being pushed into fighting with greater and greater force?

Well this is just my opinion, but the answer can perhaps be found in the famous line from the movie WarGames: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

That’s been my approach, anyway. I’ve found that getting too wrapped up in pushing or pulling any part of that debate does nothing but feed into it by increasing opposition (which is why this is likely the only article I’ll ever write on the subject), so I’m better off just focusing on attacking the actual power structure that our rulers are trying to divert us from attacking. If they’re pouring all this energy into sucking us into a culture war, the most inconvenient thing we can do to them is to keep our eyes on the prize and keep doing everything we can to hurt the agendas of the empire.

I see too many people getting drawn into this power-serving manipulation; there are indie media personalities who were calling themselves leftists not long ago but are now so fixated on fighting “the woke mind virus” that they’re becoming increasingly indistinguishable from conservative talk radio hosts on more and more subjects. It would be good if everyone whose heart is in the right place made sure there actions are, too.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/17 ... e-reasons/

The ruling class support of "wokeness" ought to be enough to set off the radar... The more they do it the more ya suspect. Individualism, the philosophical basis of capitalism is being wielded like a club in service of the ruling class and against communal needs. 'Divide and conquer' is the oldest scam in the books. Sorry to inform my fellow dumb-ass Boomers but we've been taken on a ride(and enjoyed it...). They are "humanizing" the capitalist civilization in the shallowest way possible with the implication that the bosses really do give a damn about the rest of us. What unbelievable nonsense! Are you paying attention to the world other than your inflated personal 'needs'?

It has not been easy nor cheap to manipulate necessary portions of the populace into supporting whatever the fuck appears on their screens but it's been money and effort well expended in the name of class hegemony. Both right and left are scammed relentlessly and the resulting cultural gridlock is paralyzing class politics. Which suits the ruling class fine, Did Biden not promise his real 'base' that "nothing would change"?
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The Roe V Wade decision, which would never have happened but for the anomaly of Trump, redistributing the tension to one side and thus threatening the stasis which is the boss's sweet spot, was gamely countered by upping the ante to gay and inter-racial marriage. Does anyone think Clarence Thomas was going after inter-racial marriage? No way in hell, but they needed the numbers cause support for gay marriage alone would not be enough to generate a groundswell. As long as social tension is maintained and direct other that towards then the boss's hardly care about the details: Riots and deaths here and there, so what? As long as the unwashed are not storming their booj enclaves it's a price others pay.

Act like ya got a brain.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 20, 2022 4:32 pm

The FBI has organized social media censorship for years.
December 20, 10:15

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The FBI has organized social media censorship for years.

New files released confirm orchestrated efforts between fraudsters abusing their position to distort and manipulate the information private companies are allowed to share without laws or judiciary approval (to interfere with Americans' constitutionally protected rights, as part of a larger conspiracy to interfere in the 2020 election ). Intelligence had secret one-way backchannels to relay orders to BigTech, meaning the FBI was essentially running Twitter by proxy. In other words, it became known that the bureau is directly related to censorship of information that is inconvenient for the US government.

It is also reported that the FBI began developing disinformation tools several years before the events with accusations of Trump colluding with Russia. It turns out a fairly simple plot: FBI agents allegedly infiltrated Big Tech companies and created the most complex mechanism for censoring information that was forbidden to be released. The massive number of "former" FBI agents on Twitter used infiltration to prevent the publication of "Russian disinformation". The admins were trained on how to respond to it with mass censorship. As a result, everything they wanted to remove was labeled as "Russian disinformation", including the story with Hunter's laptop and much more.

https://t.me/bigshocktheory/28066 - Zinc

Free country...human rights...freedom of speech...aha ha ha.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8042050.html

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 23, 2022 3:17 pm

US Military Thanks And Praises Retiring CNN “Journalist” For Her Service

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The US military has been showering CNN’s retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the US empire.

“Today closes a remarkable career for CNN’s Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps,” reads a post by the Twitter account for US Central Command. “Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.”

Starr received a standing ovation at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday after Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder sang her praises and thanked her for two decades on the job.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to say farewell to our media colleague, Miss Barbara Starr,” Ryder said. “Barbara has reported for CNN for over 20 years, and has been a fixture in the Pentagon Press Corps, and today marks her final day with CNN after a storied and fully-impressive — excuse me — truly impressive career.”

“So Barbara, on behalf of Secretary of Defense Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and the entire Department of Defense, I would like to extend a special congratulations and thank you for your many years of timely, insightful and important reporting on our nation’s most pressing defense issues,” Ryder continued. “And as someone who has worked with you for many of those last 20 years and someone who has had to take your late-night phone calls and emails and answer your tough, but fair questions, I can say from personal experience that the U.S. public and audiences worldwide have been well served by your in-depth reporting from the Pentagon, your journalistic integrity and your determination to tell the stories of service members worldwide, and to ensure the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve. Congratulations again, and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”
U.S. Central Command
@CENTCOM
Today closes a remarkable career for
@CNN
's @barbarastarrcnn, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps. Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.

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“You know Department of Defense better then [sic] most. We will miss you ! Thanks for your service to our Democracy! Free Independent Press !”, retired lieutenant general Russel L. Honoré told Starr on Twitter.

I actually can’t think of a clearer sign that the US does not have a “free independent press” than for the US military to be gushing affectionately about the career of a longtime CNN Pentagon correspondent, myself. And I can’t think of a more disgraceful way for a journalist to retire than with a standing ovation at the Pentagon.

Surely there can be no clearer a mark of journalistic failure than being thanked by the US military for your lifetime of service. If your journalistic relationship with the corrupt and murderous US military was ever anything other than oppositional, and their feelings toward you anything but hostile, it’s because you were never a journalist. You were their PR agent.

And indeed one need only look at Starr’s output over the course of her career to know that this was the case. Watch her uncritically parroting US government claims about chemical weapons in Syria. Watch the infomercial-like way she reports on US “war on terror” activity in the Middle East. Watch her enthusing about what a “win” the capture of Muammar Gaddafi was for the United States. Watch her finger-wagging at the president of the Philippines after he verbally insulted the president of the United States. Compare the way she talks about allegations of Russian war crimes and US war crimes.

“I’ve been listening to her for years, and I can’t recall a single time she wasn’t just reading a Pentagon press release,” tweeted activist Steve Patt.


The US military has such adoration for Barbara Starr because she is a war propagandist, just like the rest of the mainstream western news media who report on US foreign policy. And the Pentagon was joined by Starr’s fellow propagandists in celebrating her storied career.

“You are so well-respected, not only here at CNN but in the broader community of journalists — I know how well-respected you are at the Pentagon,” anchor Erica Hill told Starr on CNN.

“CNN and our viewers have benefited greatly from her truly extraordinary reporting skills and her deep knowledge of the US military, that I truly appreciate as a former CNN correspondent myself,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during his farewell to Starr.

“So well deserved. Barbara was one of the best journalists I worked with at CNN. A Pentagon legend,” tweeted Murdoch pundit Piers Morgan.

Saying farewell this morning to the great Barbara Starr on her last day at @CNN – a tremendous journalist and, most of all, a good egg. I’ll miss you my friend! pic.twitter.com/RUzZxm4aAi

— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) December 20, 2022
This is everything that is wrong with news media in the western world. Journalists are supposed to hold power to account with the light of truth, and that cannot happen if they are building warm, affectionate relationships with the people they’re meant to be aggressively scrutinizing. If the public is getting their information about the workings of the most powerful military force ever assembled by people who are friendly with and sympathetic to that military force, then they cannot possibly be getting accurate information about it. The press cannot possibly be ensuring that “the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve.”

And that is of course the point. The mass media of the western world do not exist to inform, they exist to misinform. To create a compliant and obedient populace who doesn’t interfere with the mechanisms of empire or the violence necessary for upholding it. To, as CENTCOM so aptly put it, bring the nation closer to its military.

That was Barbara Starr’s entire job, it will be the job of whoever replaces her, and it will be the job of everyone else in the Pentagon press room with them.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/21 ... r-service/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 24, 2022 3:44 pm

Reporting, Justice and Induced Dementia
DECEMBER 22, 2022

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Photo: Global Research.

By Stephen Sefton – Dec 18, 2022

People who have had to care for elderly loved ones who suffer from the terrible disease of dementia commonly find during this experience that our loved ones can hold grammatically correct but completely meaningless conversations. These may be with imaginary people, about non-existent situations, or recalling events that never happened. The conversation sounds normal, but is in fact completely absurd.

This same experience occurs when reading or listening to Western sources reporting on international affairs. It is worth remembering that last December 15th at the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, the United States and its NATO allied countries voted against a resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. It is not that the North American and European representatives abstained. No. They opposed the resolution, that is, in fact they support Nazism, a position which contradicts all the claims members of the Western political classes make to their populations about supporting democracy and human rights.

Faced with this contradiction, the very few genuinely anti-imperialist Western media outlets often analyze how Western populations can be deceived to the extreme of accepting the genocidal policies of their fascist governments and their masters in the North American and European corporate elites. For example, a common term used in those North American media outlets which criticize the imperialism of their countries is “gaslighting” derived from the famous movie “Gaslight” released in 1944. In this film the heroine is subjected to sinister, systematic manipulation by her husband, who seeks to have her declared insane in order to seize the inheritance of her aunt, whom he had previously murdered.

So now the term “gaslighting” is applied to the Western countries’ mass media psychological warfare offensive against their own populations. By means of this psychological warfare, insane false beliefs are induced in order to convince the North American and European populations that their governments’ criminal foreign policy promotes and defends democracy and human rights. To achieve the imposition of this mass induced dementia, the fundamental strategy is the incessant repetition of big lies combined with the elimination of sources of information contradicting those lies.

For this reason, the Western ruling classes implement censorship policies on social networks and eliminate information sources such as Russia’s RT or Iran’s Press TV, as took place recently through decrees of the European Union and its member countries. RT and Press TV use traditional reporting criteria in the sense of seeking to report reality. However, for Western sources of disinformation, reality is precisely what they strive to eliminate in order to be able to induce collective dementia among their populations. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, has commented on the recent censorship measures against RT noting that: “They are further proof of the European Union’s desire to severely censor information flows to the point of banning undesirable media, contrary to the principles of freedom of expression and media for which it condemns other countries. The current decision further violates the right of EU residents to access information.”

Precisely, because the reporting criteria of the Western media are formulated to induce false beliefs. For example, they promote the belief that NATO is a defensive organization, that Iran and not Israel is a nuclear threat or that Iran is a country where women are not respected, that the United States is fighting terrorism. Or they allege that China is incapable of ensuring the public health of its population, or that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are dictatorships that destabilize the region.

Of course, the reality is the opposite. Unquestionably, the revolutionary democracies of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela contribute greatly to regional stability. NATO is an aggressive military organization that attacked the civilian population of Serbia with massive bombings and supports Ukraine’s genocidal assault on the Russian-speaking population in Donbass. The United States is the most important promoter of terrorism in the world. China is one of the world’s most successful countries in defending the public health of its huge population.

It is important to understand that this is not just about the dishonest, false output of the Western media or the repressive control exercised by giant communications corporations such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. The vast Western psychological warfare apparatus also incorporates the non-governmental industrial complex and seeks to control the academic industry, since intellectual production, especially in social sciences, is of special importance in being able to induce false beliefs. Of utmost relevance in this regard too is the aggressive action of the Western powers, especially the United States, trying to impose their control of the apparatus of international law.

These include, for example, the UN Human Rights Council or the International Criminal Court and the various special tribunals established over the years to deal with specific issues, such as Rwanda, Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia, among others. These tribunals. of dubious legitimacy, very clearly carried out their investigations in support of the foreign policy objectives of the collective West against its enemies. But their tendentious conclusions go down in history as definitive, with the effect of freezing in the form of false memories the biased premises with which their original establishment was justified.

Apart from seeking control of important instances that affect the development of international jurisprudence, the United States has managed to impose its national jurisdiction over other countries. For six decades, the United States has illegally applied the genocidal Helms-Burton Act to the people of Cuba, which in effect elevates the national laws of the United States as unchallenged international standards to the detriment of the Cuban people. Another example is how Argentina, under the government of Crsitina Fernández, was the victim of intimidation and intervention by a minor judge of a district court in New York who acted aggressively in favor of US vulture funds that rejected the legitimate restructuring of Argentina’s debt agreed with all the country’s other creditors.

Last June, the United States also imposed its jurisdiction in the case of the Venezuelan plane hijacked in Argentina at which time the authorities acted with procedures in complete violation of Argentine law based on requests from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. These examples of unjustifiable, bad faith application of the law are based on the deployment of sinister artifices, completely disconnected from reality and truth. In these cases, the evidence presented is invariably grossly biased, clearly fabricated or as often as not simply non-existent.

Among the most notorious cases of this type have been the persecution and torture of Julian Assange for having revealed the crimes of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, of Vice President Jorge Glas in Ecuador, the judicial persecution of Lula da Silva and the illegal judicial kidnapping of Alex Saab. The most recent has been the infamous conviction at the beginning of this month against Cristina Fernández after more than a decade of interminable arbitrary legal attacks against her. These abuses of national justice formalize bad faith legal processes that have the intention and often the actual effect of destroying their victims. At an international level, such processes serve to pressure, harass and condemn entire countries trying to defend their national dignity and sovereignty.

Nicaragua reflected this reality in its message this month in response to yet another false report in the United Nations Human Rights Council: “The legitimate Government of Reconciliation and National Unity of Nicaragua, will not tire of repeating with dignity, loudly and irrefutably, our total rejection of this type of mechanisms, which “update their Human Rights reports”, unilaterally and in a biased manner; acting as an “instrument of pressure and interference”, by using arguments far from our nation’s reality, with the sole purpose of keeping us underdeveloped and perverting our achievements, to have us submitted to the jurisdiction of foreign powers.”

Also relevant in this context is the message to the Iranian people last November from the Leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, in which he observed in relation to the failed coup attempt by the Western powers in his country, “One of their weak points is your lucidity. When you are lucid, they suffer setbacks… What the enemy wants is to gain control of people’s minds. Controlling these is for them much more valuable than taking control of territory.”



(Tortilla con Sal)

https://orinocotribune.com/reporting-ju ... -dementia/

Behind NATO’s ‘Cognitive Warfare’: ‘Battle for Your Brain’ Waged by Western Militaries
OCTOBER 12, 2021

By Ben Norton – Oct 8, 2021

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Western governments in the NATO military alliance are developing tactics of “cognitive warfare,” using the supposed threats of China and Russia to justify waging a “battle for your brain” in the “human domain,” to “make everyone a weapon.”

NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a “battle for the brain,” as the military alliance put it.

The US-led NATO military cartel has tested novel modes of hybrid warfare against its self-declared adversaries, including economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, and psychological warfare.

Now, NATO is spinning out an entirely new kind of combat it has branded cognitive warfare. Described as the “weaponization of brain sciences,” the new method involves “hacking the individual” by exploiting “the vulnerabilities of the human brain” in order to implement more sophisticated “social engineering.”

Until recently, NATO had divided war into five different operational domains: air, land, sea, space, and cyber. But with its development of cognitive warfare strategies, the military alliance is discussing a new, sixth level: the “human domain.”

A 2020 NATO-sponsored study of this new form of warfare clearly explained, “While actions taken in the five domains are executed in order to have an effect on the human domain, cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

“The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the report stressed. “Humans are the contested domain,” and “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

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The 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare

While the NATO-backed study insisted that much of its research on cognitive warfare is designed for defensive purposes, it also conceded that the military alliance is developing offensive tactics, stating, “The human is very often the main vulnerability and it should be acknowledged in order to protect NATO’s human capital but also to be able to benefit from our adversaries’s vulnerabilities.”

In a chilling disclosure, the report said explicitly that “the objective of Cognitive Warfare is to harm societies and not only the military.”

With entire civilian populations in NATO’s crosshairs, the report emphasized that Western militaries must work more closely with academia to weaponize social sciences and human sciences and help the alliance develop its cognitive warfare capacities.

The study described this phenomenon as “the militarization of brain science.” But it appears clear that NATO’s development of cognitive warfare will lead to a militarization of all aspects of human society and psychology, from the most intimate of social relationships to the mind itself.

Such all-encompassing militarization of society is reflected in the paranoid tone of the NATO-sponsored report, which warned of “an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.” The study makes it clear that those “competitors” purportedly exploiting the consciousness of Western dissidents are China and Russia.

In other words, this document shows that figures in the NATO military cartel increasingly see their own domestic population as a threat, fearing civilians to be potential Chinese or Russian sleeper cells, dastardly “fifth columns” that challenge the stability of “Western liberal democracies.”

NATO’s development of novel forms of hybrid warfare come at a time when member states’ military campaigns are targeting domestic populations on an unprecedented level.

The Ottawa Citizen reported this September that the Canadian military’s Joint Operations Command took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to wage an information war against its own domestic population, testing out propaganda tactics on Canadian civilians.

Internal NATO-sponsored reports suggest that this disclosure is just scratching the surface of a wave of new unconventional warfare techniques that Western militaries are employing around the world.

Canada hosts ‘NATO Innovation Challenge’ on cognitive warfare

Twice each year, NATO holds a “pitch-style event” that it brand as an “Innovation Challenge.” These campaigns – one hosted in the Spring and the other in the Fall, by alternating member states – call on private companies, organizations, and researchers to help develop new tactics and technologies for the military alliance.

The shark tank-like challenges reflect the predominant influence of neoliberal ideology within NATO, as participants mobilize the free market, public-private partnerships, and the promise of cash prizes to advance the agenda of the military-industrial complex.

NATO’s Fall 2021 Innovation Challenge is hosted by Canada, and is titled “The invisible threat: Tools for countering cognitive warfare.”

Canada NATO innovation challenge cognitive warfare

“Cognitive warfare seeks to change not only what people think, but also how they act,” the Canadian government wrote in its official statement on the challenge. “Attacks against the cognitive domain involve the integration of cyber, disinformation/misinformation, psychological, and social-engineering capabilities.”

Ottawa’s press release continued: “Cognitive warfare positions the mind as a battle space and contested domain. Its objective is to sow dissonance, instigate conflicting narratives, polarize opinion, and radicalize groups. Cognitive warfare can motivate people to act in ways that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society.”

NATO-backed Canadian military officials discuss cognitive warfare in panel event

An advocacy group called the NATO Association of Canada has mobilized to support this Innovation Challenge, working closely with military contractors to attract the private sector to invest in further research on behalf of NATO – and its own bottom line.

While the NATO Association of Canada (NAOC) is technically an independent NGO, its mission is to promote NATO, and the organization boasts on its website, “The NAOC has strong ties with the Government of Canada including Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence.”

As part of its efforts to promote Canada’s NATO Innovation Challenge, the NAOC held a panel discussion on cognitive warfare on October 5.

The researcher who wrote the definitive 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare, François du Cluzel, participated in the event, alongside NATO-backed Canadian military officers.

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The October 5 panel on cognitive warfare, hosted by the NATO Association of Canada.

The panel was overseen by Robert Baines, president of the NATO Association of Canada. It was moderated by Garrick Ngai, a marketing executive in the weapons industry who serves as an adviser to the Canadian Department of National Defense and vice president and director of the NAOC.

Baines opened the event noting that participants would discuss “cognitive warfare and new domain of competition, where state and non-state actors aim to influence what people think and how they act.”

The NAOC president also happily noted the lucrative “opportunities for Canadian companies” that this NATO Innovation Challenge promised.

NATO researcher describes cognitive warfare as ‘ways of harming the brain’

The October 5 panel kicked off with François du Cluzel, a former French military officer who in 2013 helped to create the NATO Innovation Hub (iHub), which he has since then managed from its base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Although the iHub insists on its website, for legal reasons, that the “opinions expressed on this platform don’t constitute NATO or any other organization points of view,” the organization is sponsored by the Allied Command Transformation (ACT), described as “one of two Strategic Commands at the head of NATO’s military command structure.”

The Innovation Hub, therefore, acts as a kind of in-house NATO research center or think tank. Its research is not necessarily official NATO policy, but it is directly supported and overseen by NATO.

In 2020, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT) tasked du Cluzel, as manager of the iHub, to conduct a six-month study on cognitive warfare.

Du Cluzel summarized his research in the panel this October. He initiated his remarks noting that cognitive warfare “right now is one of the hottest topics for NATO,” and “has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.”

Although French, Du Cluzel emphasized that cognitive warfare strategy “is being currently developed by my command here in Norfolk, USA.”

The NATO Innovation Hub manager spoke with a PowerPoint presentation, and opened with a provocative slide that described cognitive warfare as “A Battle for the Brain.”

NATO Cognitive Warfare

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“Cognitive warfare is a new concept that starts in the information sphere, that is a kind of hybrid warfare,” du Cluzel said.

“It starts with hyper-connectivity. Everyone has a cell phone,” he continued. “It starts with information because information is, if I may say, the fuel of cognitive warfare. But it goes way beyond solely information, which is a standalone operation – information warfare is a standalone operation.”

Cognitive warfare overlaps with Big Tech corporations and mass surveillance, because “it’s all about leveraging the big data,” du Cluzel explained. “We produce data everywhere we go. Every minute, every second we go, we go online. And this is extremely easy to leverage those data in order to better know you and use that knowledge to change the way you think.”

Naturally, the NATO researcher claimed foreign “adversaries” are the supposed aggressors employing cognitive warfare. But at the same time, he made it clear that the Western military alliance is developing its own tactics.

Du Cluzel defined cognitive warfare as the “art of using technologies to alter the cognition of human targets.”

Those technologies, he noted, incorporate the fields of NBIC – nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. All together, “it makes a kind of very dangerous cocktail that can further manipulate the brain,” he said.

NATO cognitive warfare human targets

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Du Cluzel went on to explain that the exotic new method of attack “goes well beyond” information warfare or psychological operations (psyops).

“Cognitive warfare is not only a fight against what we think, but it’s rather a fight against the way we think, if we can change the way people think,” he said. “It’s much more powerful and it goes way beyond the information [warfare] and psyops.”

De Cluzel continued: “It’s crucial to understand that it’s a game on our cognition, on the way our brain processes information and turns it into knowledge, rather than solely a game on information or on psychological aspects of our brains. It’s not only an action against what we think, but also an action against the way we think, the way we process information and turn it into knowledge.”

“In other words, cognitive warfare is not just another word, another name for information warfare. It is a war on our individual processor, our brain.”

The NATO researcher stressed that “this is extremely important for us in the military,” because “it has the potential, by developing new weapons and ways of harming the brain, it has the potential to engage neuroscience and technology in many, many different approaches to influence human ecology… because you all know that it’s very easy to turn a civilian technology into a military one.”

NATO cognitive warfare psyops

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As for who the targets of cognitive warfare could be, du Cluzel revealed that anyone and everyone is on the table.

“Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from starting with the individual to states and multinational organizations,” he said. “Its field of action is global and aim to seize control of the human being, civilian as well as military.”

And the private sector has a financial interest in advancing cognitive warfare research, he noted: “The massive worldwide investments made in neurosciences suggests that the cognitive domain will probably one of the battlefields of the future.”

The development of cognitive warfare totally transforms military conflict as we know it, du Cluzel said, adding “a third major combat dimension to the modern battlefield: to the physical and informational dimension is now added a cognitive dimension.”

This “creates a new space of competition beyond what is called the five domains of operations – or land, sea, air, cyber, and space domains. Warfare in the cognitive arena mobilizes a wider range of battle spaces than solely the physical and information dimensions can do.”

In short, humans themselves are the new contested domain in this novel mode of hybrid warfare, alongside land, sea, air, cyber, and outer space.


NATO cognitive warfare humans domain

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NATO’s cognitive warfare study warns of “embedded fifth column”

The study that NATO Innovation Hub manager François du Cluzel conducted, from June to November 2020, was sponsored by the military cartel’s Allied Command Transformation, and published as a 45-page report in January 2021 (PDF).

The chilling document shows how contemporary warfare has reached a kind of dystopian stage, once imaginable only in science fiction.

“The nature of warfare has changed,” the report emphasized. “The majority of current conflicts remain below the threshold of the traditionally accepted definition of warfare, but new forms of warfare have emerged such as Cognitive Warfare (CW), while the human mind is now being considered as a new domain of war.”

For NATO, research on cognitive warfare is not just defensive; it is very much offensive as well.

“Developing capabilities to harm the cognitive abilities of opponents will be a necessity,” du Cluzel’s report stated clearly. “In other words, NATO will need to get the ability to safeguard her decision making process and disrupt the adversary’s one.”

And anyone could be a target of these cognitive warfare operations: “Any user of modern information technologies is a potential target. It targets the whole of a nation’s human capital,” the report ominously added.

“As well as the potential execution of a cognitive war to complement to a military conflict, it can also be conducted alone, without any link to an engagement of the armed forces,” the study went on. “Moreover, cognitive warfare is potentially endless since there can be no peace treaty or surrender for this type of conflict.”

Just as this new mode of battle has no geographic borders, it also has no time limit: “This battlefield is global via the internet. With no beginning and no end, this conquest knows no respite, punctuated by notifications from our smartphones, anywhere, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”

The NATO-sponsored study noted that “some NATO Nations have already acknowledged that neuroscientific techniques and technologies have high potential for operational use in a variety of security, defense and intelligence enterprises.”

It spoke of breakthroughs in “neuroscientific methods and technologies” (neuroS/T), and said “uses of research findings and products to directly facilitate the performance of combatants, the integration of human machine interfaces to optimise combat capabilities of semi autonomous vehicles (e.g., drones), and development of biological and chemical weapons (i.e., neuroweapons).”

The Pentagon is among the primary institutions advancing this novel research, as the report highlighted: “Although a number of nations have pursued, and are currently pursuing neuroscientific research and development for military purposes, perhaps the most proactive efforts in this regard have been conducted by the United States Department of Defense; with most notable and rapidly maturing research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).”

Military uses of neuroS/T research, the study indicated, include intelligence gathering, training, “optimising performance and resilience in combat and military support personnel,” and of course “direct weaponisation of neuroscience and neurotechnology.”

This weaponization of neuroS/T can and will be fatal, the NATO-sponsored study was clear to point out. The research can “be utilised to mitigate aggression and foster cognitions and emotions of affiliation or passivity; induce morbidity, disability or suffering; and ‘neutralise’ potential opponents or incur mortality” – in other words, to maim and kill people.

NATO cognitive warfare report

The 2020 NATO-sponsored study on cognitive warfare
The report quoted US Major General Robert H. Scales, who summarized NATO’s new combat philosophy: “Victory will be defined more in terms of capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.”

And as NATO develops tactics of cognitive warfare to “capture the psycho-cultural,” it is also increasingly weaponizing various scientific fields.

The study spoke of “the crucible of data sciences and human sciences,” and stressed that “the combination of Social Sciences and System Engineering will be key in helping military analysts to improve the production of intelligence.”

“If kinetic power cannot defeat the enemy,” it said, “psychology and related behavioural and social sciences stand to fill the void.”

“Leveraging social sciences will be central to the development of the Human Domain Plan of Operations,” the report went on. “It will support the combat operations by providing potential courses of action for the whole surrounding Human Environment including enemy forces, but also determining key human elements such as the Cognitive center of gravity, the desired behaviour as the end state.”

All academic disciplines will be implicated in cognitive warfare, not just the hard sciences. “Within the military, expertise on anthropology, ethnography, history, psychology among other areas will be more than ever required to cooperate with the military,” the NATO-sponsored study stated.

The report nears its conclusion with an eerie quote: “Today’s progresses in nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC), boosted by the seemingly unstoppable march of a triumphant troika made of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and civilisational ‘digital addiction’ have created a much more ominous prospect: an embedded fifth column, where everyone, unbeknownst to him or her, is behaving according to the plans of one of our competitors.”

“The modern concept of war is not about weapons but about influence,” it posited. “Victory in the long run will remain solely dependent on the ability to influence, affect, change or impact the cognitive domain.”

The NATO-sponsored study then closed with a final paragraph that makes it clear beyond doubt that the Western military alliance’s ultimate goal is not only physical control of the planet, but also control over people’s minds:

“Cognitive warfare may well be the missing element that allows the transition from military victory on the battlefield to lasting political success. The human domain might well be the decisive domain, wherein multi-domain operations achieve the commander’s effect. The five first domains can give tactical and operational victories; only the human domain can achieve the final and full victory.”

Canadian Special Operations officer emphasizes importance of cognitive warfare
When François du Cluzel, the NATO researcher who conducted the study on cognitive warfare, concluded his remarks in the October 5 NATO Association of Canada panel, he was followed by Andy Bonvie, a commanding officer at the Canadian Special Operations Training Centre.

With more than 30 years of experience with the Canadian Armed Forces, Bonvie spoke of how Western militaries are making use of research by du Cluzel and others, and incorporating novel cognitive warfare techniques into their combat activities.

“Cognitive warfare is a new type of hybrid warfare for us,” Bonvie said. “And it means that we need to look at the traditional thresholds of conflict and how the things that are being done are really below those thresholds of conflict, cognitive attacks, and non-kinetic forms and non-combative threats to us. We need to understand these attacks better and adjust their actions and our training accordingly to be able to operate in these different environments.”

NATO cognitive warfare Andy Bonvie

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Although he portrayed NATO’s actions as “defensive,” claiming “adversaries” were using cognitive warfare against them, Bonvie was unambiguous about the fact that Western militaries are developing these tecniques themselves, to maintain a “tactical advantage.”

“We cannot lose the tactical advantage for our troops that we’re placing forward as it spans not only tactically, but strategically,” he said. “Some of those different capabilities that we have that we enjoy all of a sudden could be pivoted to be used against us. So we have to better understand how quickly our adversaries adapt to things, and then be able to predict where they’re going in the future, to help us be and maintain the tactical advantage for our troops moving forward.”

‘Cognitive warfare is the most advanced form of manipulation seen to date’

Marie-Pierre Raymond, a retired Canadian lieutenant colonel who currently serves as a “defence scientist and innovation portfolio manager” for the Canadian Armed Forces’ Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security Program, also joined the October 5 panel.

“Long gone are the days when war was fought to acquire more land,” Raymond said. “Now the new objective is to change the adversaries’ ideologies, which makes the brain the center of gravity of the human. And it makes the human the contested domain, and the mind becomes the battlefield.”

“When we speak about hybrid threats, cognitive warfare is the most advanced form of manipulation seen to date,” she added, noting that it aims to influence individuals’ decision-making and “to influence a group of a group of individuals on their behavior, with the aim of gaining a tactical or strategic advantage.”

Raymond noted that cognitive warfare also heavily overlaps with artificial intelligence, big data, and social media, and reflects “the rapid evolution of neurosciences as a tool of war.”

Raymond is helping to oversee the NATO Fall 2021 Innovation Challenge on behalf of Canada’s Department of National Defence, which delegated management responsibilities to the military’s Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security (IDEaS) Program, where she works.

In highly technical jargon, Raymond indicated that the cognitive warfare program is not solely defensive, but also offensive: “This challenge is calling for a solution that will support NATO’s nascent human domain and jump-start the development of a cognition ecosystem within the alliance, and that will support the development of new applications, new systems, new tools and concepts leading to concrete action in the cognitive domain.”

She emphasized that this “will require sustained cooperation between allies, innovators, and researchers to enable our troops to fight and win in the cognitive domain. This is what we are hoping to emerge from this call to innovators and researchers.”

To inspire corporate interest in the NATO Innovation Challenge, Raymond enticed, “Applicants will receive national and international exposure and cash prizes for the best solution.” She then added tantalizingly, “This could also benefit the applicants by potentially providing them access to a market of 30 nations.”

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Canadian military officer calls on corporations to invest in NATO’s cognitive warfare research
The other institution that is managing the Fall 2021 NATO Innovation Challenge on behalf of Canada’s Department of National Defense is the Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM).

A Canadian military officer who works with CANSOFCOM, Shekhar Gothi, was the final panelist in the October 5 NATO Association of Canada event. Gothi serves as CANSOFCOM’s “innovation officer” for Southern Ontario.

He concluded the event appealing for corporate investment in NATO’s cognitive warfare research.

The bi-annual Innovation Challenge is “part of the NATO battle rhythm,” Gothi declared enthusiastically.

He noted that, in the spring of 2021, Portugal held a NATO Innovation Challenge focused on warfare in outer space.

In spring 2020, the Netherlands hosted a NATO Innovation Challengefocused on Covid-19.

Gothi reassured corporate investors that NATO will bend over backward to defend their bottom lines: “I can assure everyone that the NATO innovation challenge indicates that all innovators will maintain complete control of their intellectual property. So NATO won’t take control of that. Neither will Canada. Innovators will maintain their control over their IP.”

The comment was a fitting conclusion to the panel, affirming that NATO and its allies in the military-industrial complex not only seek to dominate the world and the humans that inhabit it with unsettling cognitive warfare techniques, but to also ensure that corporations and their shareholders continue to profit from these imperial endeavors.

https://orinocotribune.com/behind-natos ... ilitaries/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 29, 2022 3:58 pm

Propaganda Isn’t Something That Only Happens To Others: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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One of the empire’s strongest assets is the widespread assumption that propaganda is something that only happens to other people. Another is the widespread assumption that propaganda only comes from other countries and other political ideologies.

The status quo remains the status quo because those who benefit from the status quo are able to use the wealth and power given to them by the status quo to dissuade the public from overthrowing the status quo using status quo media to manufacture their consent for the status quo.

The empire will use any ideology to advance its agendas. “Wokeism”, white supremacism, Zionism, Christian fundamentalism, liberalism, conservatism, progressivism — whatever ideological sympathies can be leveraged, will be leveraged.

The empire will use Nazism and wokeness, at the same time, on the same agenda. Look at the way the empire is using neo-Nazism to advance one part of its Ukraine agenda and using woke-sounding jargon to advance another part. They’re two diametrically opposed values, but it doesn’t matter because the empire has no values besides the pursuit of power.


The engineering of the empire doesn’t have an ideology for the same reason mugging doesn’t have an ideology; it has one goal, and that goal has nothing to do with anyone’s values or ideals. A con man will say whatever you need to hear to get his hands on your money.

The empire uses “wokeism” not because the empire gives a shit about social justice, but because that’s where easily leveraged public sympathies are found at the moment. Getting hung up on wokeism is like fixating on the syringe and not the hand that’s holding it or the poison it holds.

The empire uses ideologies the way we use tools. When it doesn’t need the screwdriver, it picks up the hammer. Right now it’s getting a lot of use out of “wokeism”, and tomorrow it will be something else. Don’t focus so much on the tools, focus on who’s using them, and what they’re being used for.



One of the silliest things about this proxy war is how empire apologists will call it an “unprovoked invasion“, then pivot to gushing about how efficient and cost-effective the war is for advancing US strategic interests against Russia, then pivot right back to calling it an “unprovoked invasion” again.

These are mutually contradictory positions. Either it’s a completely unprovoked invasion that the US didn’t want, or it’s a highly efficient and cost-effective way of getting Washington everything it wants. It’s nonsensical and naive to believe both.



The dream for automation was that it would be used to eliminate the need for human toil. In practice so far it’s only being used to increase inequality: generating more profits for the ruling class while leaving normal people poorer and more desperate. Market forces only encourage more of this.

Apologists for the status quo are basically coming right out and telling us that automation will be used to increase income and wealth inequality, and they’re absolutely correct. That’s what’s been happening, and it will continue until it is made to stop.


Meanwhile we’re seeing the steady normalization of increasingly militarized robots, which will eventually become capable of suppressing domestic uprisings without the annoying human tendency to refuse to fire upon their countrymen, or even switch sides and join the revolution. So we appear to be headed for tremendous poverty and injustice if we don’t force a change in the trajectory we’re on, and if we don’t force it soon they’ll have robotic security systems to stop us. The robots will either be made to work for us, or they’ll be used against us.

This is the trajectory we’ll be on as long as capitalism remains in place and the class which rules it retains control of automation. Vastly unequal tech dystopia where the people are controlled by AI and weaponized robots is the final stage of capitalism (before death by ecocide).

I often hear people saying that those who have been propagandized into accepting the mainstream worldview are stupid, but from what I can tell the successfulness of empire propaganda in taking over people’s minds has very little to do with anyone’s intelligence. You’ve probably noticed that some of the smartest people you know in your own life uncritically regurgitate the same narratives about the world that you’ll hear on CNN or the BBC. Generally, intelligent people differ from the less intelligent only in that they have more clever justifications and defenses for the perspectives they’ve been propagandized into believing.

The tendency to meet authority-endorsed information with critical thought and scrutiny seems to have a lot more to do with the dumb luck of having been conditioned to do so by the kind of life you have lived. If there’s any sort of personal attribute that leaves one less vulnerable to propaganda, it could be described as a sincere devotion to the truth. A sincere devotion to knowing what’s true, and to seeing, thinking and living accordingly. This quality can emerge in people of any kind of intelligence.

A sincere devotion to the truth also happens to be the quality most essential for realizing spiritual enlightenment. It’s also the quality most essential for living a happy life. Whatever that strange spark is and whatever gives rise to it wherever it shows up, it’s pretty clear that it’s the guiding light that will lead our species to sanity.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/28 ... ve-matrix/

Well, I find that hatred of injustice works pretty good for me....
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 31, 2022 3:20 pm

Besides Twitter, US Gov't Meddles in More Platforms' Content

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View of a hall in the CIA building, U.S. | Photo: Twitter/ @RobertKennedyJr

Published 30 December 2022

The U.S. government has been in constant contact with virtually every major tech firm, including Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, and Pinterest.


After a series of "Twitter Files" over the weeks disclosing the U.S. involvement in the social media company's content moderation, the latest installment came as Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the same is happening in "every social media company."

"Google frequently makes links disappear, for example," said Musk, who purchased Twitter two months ago and later decided to release the Twitter Files, namely internal documents such as emails and chat logs between employees.

He made the claims in a response to Matt Taibbi, one of the freelance journalists to whom Musk gave the files exclusively to delve into and publish excerpts and their findings on Twitter. Musk has not made the entire files public.

Long before the Twitter Files disclosure, U.S. security and intelligence departments were accused of pressuring tech firms to manipulate public opinion by censoring content, blacklisting or whitelisting certain users and cultivating accounts for political aims.


TWITTER FILES
As the massive files unfold how Twitter handled high-profile events, like the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. government agencies, not least the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, is reported to have long and deeply involved in Twitter's content moderation.

Dubbing Twitter "the FBI subsidiary," Taibbi said the FBI, with "constant and pervasive" contact with Twitter, gave the platform "a surprisingly high number" of requests to take action on "election misinformation," even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts. Agencies like the FBI and the DHS regularly send social media content to Twitter for moderation.

The FBI also pushed Twitter to suppress a news story about the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of then presidential candidate Joe Biden, during the 2020 election by warning it could be part of a Russian trick, according to Michael Shellenberger, another journalist with access to the files.

In a statement in response to the disclosures, the FBI said, "it is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency."

In his latest reveal on Dec. 25, Taibbi said the U.S. government was "in constant contact not just with Twitter but with virtually every major tech firm," including Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit and Pinterest.


"FORMALIZED" CENSORSHIP
In August, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted in a podcast that weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Facebook had censored the Hunter Biden story after an FBI misinformation warning of "Russian propaganda."

The interference may not be an incident, but a result of institutionalized government censorship. As an October report by U.S. news organization The Intercept has found, through "a formalized process," government officials directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram, and request that it be throttled or suppressed.

In the coming years, the DHS plans to target information it deems "inaccurate" on topics including the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the U.S. support for Ukraine, the report said, citing a leaked draft copy of the DHS.

The "inaccuracy" identification, which is inherently subjective, may provide a broad opening for DHS officials to "make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech," the authors said.

"Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse," said the report, which analyzed years of internal DHS documents.


GOV'T-NURTURED USERS
The U.S. government has even nurtured accounts as part of its propaganda. Research published by the Stanford Internet Observatory has exposed years-long covert influence operations for promoting pro-Western narratives on social media platforms while opposing several other countries, with the role of the U.S. government under scrutiny.

The investigation revealed an interconnected web of accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that "used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives in the Middle East and Central Asia."

It also showed the assets identified by Twitter and Meta created fake personas, posed as independent media outlets, leveraged memes and short-form videos, attempted to start hashtag campaigns, and launched online petitions.

Lee Fang, another journalist with access to the Twitter Files, has found similar schemes. He said that Twitter worked with the Pentagon from 2017 to 2020 to promote Arab-language accounts to tilt public opinion in favor of U.S. policies.

Twitter offered approval and protection to the U.S. military's network of social media accounts and online personas, "whitelisting" a batch of accounts at the request of the government, Fang said. There is no immediate response from the Pentagon.

Back to the early 2000s, U.S. government agencies, particularly the DHS and the FBI, have been "in this business of arbitrating what is true and false," Will Thibeau and Erin Dwinell, researchers with the Heritage Foundation, wrote in a November commentary titled "When government colludes with big tech to censor Americans."

"However, today's censorship and propaganda are growing at a rate we've never experienced before. Big tech gives our government the tools to be dangerously effective in their efforts," they warned.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bes ... -0005.html
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 02, 2023 2:47 pm

Western Governments Keep Assigning Themselves The Authority To Regulate Online Speech

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Depending on what political echo chamber you’ve been viewing it from, the ongoing release of information about the inner workings of pre-Musk Twitter known as “the Twitter Files” might look like the bombshell news story of the century, or it might look like a complete nothingburger whose importance is being wildly exaggerated by the far right.

From where I’m sitting, the Twitter Files look like entirely newsworthy revelations which add new detail to information that had already been spilling out about the way government agencies have been inserting themselves into Silicon Valley’s processes of regulating online speech. Right wing punditry has of course been exaggerating the significance of the releases and spinning them in all kinds of disingenuous ways, and Musk himself plainly has a partisan agenda in releasing the information in the way that he has been, but it’s not actually difficult to separate that from the value of the information being released.

Many liberals and leftists have struggled to grasp this (in my view simple and obvious) distinction, but we’re now seeing articles coming out in publications like The Guardian and Jacobin explaining to their respective audiences that it should actually concern anyone who opposes government tyranny to see secretive agencies taking it upon themselves to control the way people talk to each other on the internet.

“Make no mistake: while some criticisms of the project coming from left of center certainly have merit, that doesn’t mean the disclosures aren’t important, or that the accuracy of the information contained in the files is somehow undermined by the political slant of some of those reporting on it,” writes Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “The Twitter Files give us an unprecedented peek behind the curtain at the workings of Twitter’s opaque censorship regime, and expose in greater detail the secret and ongoing merger of social media companies and the US national security state.”


The Twitter Files show an outrageous and unacceptable amount of overlap between Twitter management and many US government agencies — including the CIA — in not just the censorship and shadowbanning of unauthorized speech but also whitelisting and amplifying actual psyops of the US military. The justifications for this have ranged from fighting “Covid misinformation” to combating “foreign influence” (the latter of which is odd because those efforts seem to have focused primarily on domestic speech), but what apparently went completely unquestioned the entire time was whether these government institutions have any business inserting themselves into the regulation of public speech at all.

This bizarre assumption that governments need to involve themselves in policing online speech has been rapidly normalizing itself around the western world. Here in Australia we’ve got government officials suddenly babbling about the need to restrict the spread of “conspiracy theories” after a shooting that left two police officers dead. The EU has its controversial Digital Services Act, which Elon Musk is interestingly an enthusiastic supporter of despite being publicly warned that Twitter could be banned throughout the European Union if Twitter doesn’t sufficiently restrict speech on the platform.

(Musk has, while we’re on the subject, continued the practices of branding media figures as “state-affiliated media” if they’re associated with empire-targeted governments, banning people for questioning official narratives about the war in Ukraine, and restricting the visibility of state media for empire-targeted governments while letting western propagandists run rampant. So while some are falling all over themselves in fawning hero worship of the billionaire Pentagon contractor, I personally am not expecting to crown him a free speech warrior anytime soon.)

And what’s important to remember about the Twitter Files is that Twitter has historically been the least compliant with government demands for speech regulation of all the major platforms. Everything we’re learning about what’s been happening in Twitter has surely been happening to a much greater extent with Google/YouTube and Meta/Facebook/Instagram.


Do you remember voting for government agencies to insert themselves into the regulation of online speech? I don’t remember any such vote. I don’t remember any politician campaigning to do this or any part of the public being asked for their permission at all. It sure seems like they appointed that authority to themselves without the permission of the electorate, solely for their own benefit. It’s almost like democracy is an illusion and our rulers do whatever they want to us, up to and including restricting the ways we’re allowed to communicate with each other, in whatever way benefits them and their agendas.

Online speech has nothing to do with the government. Nothing whatsoever. Governments have no more business regulating online speech than they have regulating what consenting adults do in the bedroom, and until very recently this was universally understood as one of the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. But with a little narrative-diddling over the last few years they’ve managed to intertwine themselves with the online platforms we use to communicate with each other worldwide.

And as all this information comes out we’re seeing imperial narrative managers working to manipulate the debate into an argument about what kinds of government interventions in public speech are acceptable and how far they should go, rather than whether the government should be involving itself in the business of online speech regulation at all. One of main jobs of an empire propagandist is to get people arguing over how ugly imperial agendas should be rolled out, rather than if they should.

This is insane. Let the powerful involve themselves in the regulation of public speech and they will regulate it to their advantage every time. This should be obvious to everyone.

The response to all this should not be mitigated. The response should not be to get bogged down in partisan bickering and culture war distractions. The response should not quibble about whether this or that activity was technically legal or a breach of the First Amendment or not. The response should be an unequivocal, “No. This is not your area. Out. Now.”

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/02 ... ne-speech/

************

When propaganda itself cries 'propaganda'
By Zhang Zhouxiang | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-01-02 08:27

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Twitter logo and Elon Musk silhouette are seen in this illustration taken, Dec 19, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

"Twitter aided the Pentagon in its covert online propaganda campaign". This screaming headline, in bold upper case, in a report in US-based website The Intercept, exposes the irony of the West's hollow claim that the press, the fourth pillar of society, should be independent.

On the one hand, Twitter itself claims it curbs government-backed propaganda. However, The Intercept has reported in detail how the CIA and the FBI meddled in Twitter's content moderation, how it colluded with the Pentagon to run fake account networks around the world, and how it blacklisted or whitelisted certain accounts at the request of the US government.

The widely quoted report tells how Twitter is colluding with the US government to selectively oppose "government-backed propaganda". Which is in keeping with US politicians' plan both at home and abroad to paint any nation they dislike as evil. It is for this reason that Western politicians played certain young people in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region against their country in 2019, fabricated "labor camp" lies about the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region in 2020 and poured dirty water against the non-Western world whichever way they liked.

The relationship between Twitter and the US government makes one see political bias in quite a high percentage of news posted on the platform. In fact, this is how Twitter is losing its credibility.

Some might argue that Twitter is not a news body like New York Times or CNBC. However, unlike other social media sites, Twitter features accounts of almost all mainstream media outlets and many quote Twitter accounts as serious news sources. But, since 2021, Twitter has labeled Chinese news agency and personal accounts as "Chinese State-affiliated media" and further warned against links to Chinese media outlets since March 2022, reportedly under guidance from the US government.

So here's propaganda itself crying "stop propaganda". What could be more ironical?

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... a7325.html
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 04, 2023 3:52 pm

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<snip>

To be clear, the US empire is getting everything it wants out of the war in Ukraine. It claims out of one side of its mouth that this was an unprovoked invasion that it never wanted, while admitting this war is giving it everything it ever wanted out the other side. The US did not just luckily stumble into a happy coincidence that just happens to advance all of its longstanding geostrategic agendas against a longtime geopolitical target. It deliberately created this situation, and only a baby-brained idiot would believe otherwise.

Putin isn’t waging this war because he thought it would be a nice idea to grab a bit more land, he’s waging it because he assessed that he’d need to fight off NATO aggressions in Ukraine at some point and it would be easier to do it now than later. People say “Hurr hurr, if the US provoked this war to advance its own interests then Putin’s an idiot for falling for it,” but anyone who’s ever played chess knows strategy is often about forcing your opponent to choose between two bad options, either of which benefit you.

There’s still this notion in some anti-imperialist factions that Putin is a brilliant strategic wizard who is outfoxing the empire in a game of 5D chess, but really he’s just fighting on the back foot against a far wealthier, far more powerful foe, and it’s costing his nation dearly.

Whether Ukraine “wins” this war or not is irrelevant to the fact that the US empire was for relatively little cost able to create a massive sinkhole for Moscow to pour its energy and attention into, freeing up the imperial machine to focus on turning the screws on China.



Friendly reminder that China poses a threat solely to the US empire and its agendas of planetary domination, not to the US as a country. Empire architects are intentionally confusing Americans and other westerners by conflating these two issues in a massive propaganda campaign.



Being a child of wealthy parents is like being born into a cult whose entire focus is reinforcing class solidarity for the ruling class. Their social culture, academic culture, family culture etc are all dedicated to building an elite commonality that excludes the common riff raff.

That’s why the ruling class have such vastly superior class solidarity to the working class. Most of us aren’t raised with an acute awareness that we are very different from the ruling class and that their interests conflict with our own, but everyone in the ruling class is. By the time they’re mature enough to take the reins, members of the ruling class have been run through an entire cultural processing system dedicated to forming solidarity with their class, while the rest of us have been focused on keeping our heads above water.



One of the dopiest beliefs on the “populist right” currently is that the ruling elites care about normalizing wokeism and social justice. Our rulers don’t give a fuck about trans rights or whatever, they only care about fanning the flames of culture war to prevent a class war. Our rulers would happily incinerate every trans person in the world if it meant cementing their rule. The instant Black Lives Matter sloganeering ceases to be politically useful it will be flushed down the toilet. They don’t care about marginalized groups, they just use them.

It’s so stupid. Like yeah, powerful plutocrats and secretive government agencies are scheming to normalize LGBT rights because they stopped caring about power and domination and just love wokeness now. Good thinking, dipshit.

In reality, marginalized groups pose no threat to you in any way whatsoever. You are meant to view them as the enemy so that you don’t view your rulers (who don’t care about either of you) as the enemy.



Rightists who think of themselves as anti-establishment rebels while clapping along with Trump, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk are exactly the same as Democrats who called themselves The Resistance for clapping along with Mueller and Rachel Maddow. They’re the same kind of mainstream dupes, just with different narratives.

“Resistance” liberals thought they were fighting the man because they were trying to get the president arrested. MAGA rightists think they’re fighting the man because something something deep state. But in reality they’re both just mainstream partisans who fully support the imperial uniparty.

At least Democrats are honest about being Democrats. Rightists will clap along with mainstream Republican politicians and mainstream Republican pundits and then call other people mainstream partisan NPCs. Really they’re exactly the same. They’re Republicans LARPing as nonpartisan free thinkers.



I don’t dismiss mainstream politicians and media because it’s inherently bad to be mainstream, I do it because right now we live in a highly controlled civilization wherein the only things permitted to go mainstream are those that help (or at least do not hinder) our rulers. Right now the ruling class which controls all means of mainstream elevation only elevates things which either (A) actively advance their interests or (B) normalize the status quo we live in with things like shows and movies that depict people thriving under our current systems.

So right now there’s a wisdom in rejection of the mainstream. But we shouldn’t confuse that with the idea that being mainstream is always bad. Our goal should be to have our own healthy values of peace, equality and justice be the mainstream one day.

It’s a sign of toxicity to be elevated to the mainstream under the current status quo. But we should keep in mind that if we are successful in changing the status quo, the shifting of what becomes mainstream will one day be a sign of health.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/03 ... ve-matrix/

The portion I snipped away a bit of panegyric maintaining the righteousness of "Western values'. While perhaps acceptable on the most superficial of levels any examination of the origins of the supporting statements of this position reveals them to be nothing but self-serving window dressing for ruling class domination. The Declaration of Independence, for instance...

As long as we are ruled by capitalists it is safe to assume that anything 'mainstream' is toxic until proven otherwise.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 05, 2023 4:09 pm

CNN Recruits Washington’s Worst Warmonger The Instant He Leaves Congress

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CNN has shattered the speed of light in its haste to recruit former representative Adam Kinzinger to its punditry lineup the millisecond he left congress.

Kinzinger, who prior to being redistricted out of his House seat received handsome campaign contributions from arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, Democratic Congressman was arguably the most egregious warmonger on Capitol Hill.

Nobody in congress lobbied as aggressively to start World War Three as Democrat Kinzinger did last year; he tried to advance a bill authorizing hot war against Russia if Moscow crossed specified red lines in Ukraine but couldn’t get cosponsors because even his fellow congressional hawks thought it was too insane. He was the loudest voice in the US government publicly advocating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, an idea that was slammed by the mass media as it would necessarily have entailed the US military shooting down Russian war planes and aggressively tempted nuclear war.


Democrat Kinzinger was such a demented omnicidal maniac in 2022 that while still in office he became an official member of the empire-backed online troll farm known as “NAFO”, which was founded by an actual neo-Nazi whom Kinzinger openly supported both before and after revelations emerged of the founder’s expressions of hatred for Jews and fondness for Hitler. While still a sitting congressman he was flagging trolls with hashtags inviting them to swarm the social media comments of critics of US foreign policy who opposed his psychopathic warmongering.

Before the war in Ukraine Democrat Kinzinger was calling for the re-invasion of Afghanistan immediately following the US troop withdrawal and raging about public opposition to “endless war.” Before that he was cheerleading Trump’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, calling for US interventionism in Venezuela, defending the US-backed war on Yemen, calling for the invasion of Syria, and just generally pushing for more war and militarism at every opportunity. Before that, he was helping the empire kill Iraqis as a member of the US Air Force.

Demcratic Congressman Kinzinger is such an obnoxious warmonger online that I myself have called him “the single worst Twitter account that has ever existed,” long before his CNN gig was a twinkle in his eye.

So it’s no wonder a warmongering propaganda network snapped him up the instant he became available, ensuring that his warmongering receives as large a platform as possible. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp quipped regarding CNN’s hire, “All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig.”


Kinzinger’s assimilation into the war propaganda industry was so predictable that Glenn Greenwald included it in a Twitter poll this past October asking his audience where they expect his career will take him after he leaves congress, with CNN being one of the options. As one Twitter follower put it, the “congressman to media commentator to lobbyist revolving door spins so fast in Washington, it actually affects the earth’s rotation relative to the sun.”

War is the glue that holds the US empire together, and to serve that purpose it requires endless war propaganda. War propagandists are not any more separate from the endless mass military slaughter they facilitate than the people who actually pull the trigger, and we see this illustrated in the way
Democrat Kinzinger has been able to slide seamlessly from dropping bombs to passing bomb-dropping legislation to manufacturing consent for the dropping of bombs.

We live under an empire that is fueled by lies and human blood, and driven by the ongoing efforts of murderous war sluts like Adam Kinzinger.

CNN will be perfect for him.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/05 ... -congress/

Which is NOT to say that any Republican criticizing Democratic war-mongering would be any the less warmongering were their party in power. Ain't nothing but partisan politics, which is expected from the minority party in our cynical and insane system of rule.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/01/05 ... -congress/

'Red' added, just to be clear...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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