Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 24, 2023 3:00 pm

Narrative Is Used To Override Healthy Human Self-Interest

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It’s very odd how humans can be manipulated into acting against their own self-interest to the benefit of their rulers in ways that animals would never tolerate, just by exploiting the fact that we experience thoughts in our heads that animals do not experience.

Take violence, for example. Predator animals survive by attacking and killing other animals for their own benefit, but as soon as a prey animal makes it clear that it’s not worth the effort, the predator will back off in its own self-interest. The predator understands instinctually that attacking a healthy bull elephant isn’t worth the risk to its own physical wellbeing, and even a wildebeest that proves stronger than expected will be backed off from. A broken bone or a nasty wound can mean the death of the predator, and even a prey animal that forces a predator to expend too much energy won’t be deemed worth the effort when there’s slower, weaker prey to be found.

With less advanced organisms that animal self-interest often isn’t there. Ants for example will charge into battle to their certain death against much larger foes who pose a threat to their nest, instinctually valuing the collective wellbeing of the colony above their own lives. Honeybees will sacrifice their own lives to land a good sting on a threat to the hive, their stingers evolved so that they rip out their own guts when they pierce the flesh of their target.

Humans, interestingly, fall somewhere between tiny-brained hive insects and the larger-brained mammals and birds in terms of self-preservation impulses involving violence, despite having the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom. We have the same instinctive aversions to putting ourselves at risk as those other animals, but that instinct can be overridden by putting a bunch of stories in our heads about how the enemy must be destroyed for this or that reason. A few false narratives about God and glory had humans marching off to fight and die in the Crusades like a bunch of mindless insects.

This is because the capacity for abstract thought that our recently evolved brains have given us can be exploited by clever humans with a predisposition toward manipulation. Because we’re often finding our way around in the world by thoughts and language rather than instinct, we can be manipulated into acting far more foolishly than a pigeon or a squirrel or a tiger ever would.

As humans have gotten better at sharing ideas and information with each other our awareness about what’s real and what’s false has expanded, so we don’t see as many manipulations involving God and glory anymore. Now more clever lies are required to get us charging off to war, like the need to spread freedom and democracy and protect our loved ones from terrorism.

And the same dynamic is used to get us acting against our own interests to the benefit of our rulers throughout every aspect of human civilization, not just with war and violence. Our mental soundtracks are manipulated by propaganda into consenting to extremely abusive systems where people will be deprived of basic human needs if they can’t shape themselves into useful cogs in the machine of industry. Where money can be used for political influence, which can in turn be used to funnel more money to those who have lots of it from those who have very little. Where privacy for the individual is continuously eroded while secrecy for the government is continually thickened.

Environmental destruction. Economic injustice and inequality. Rentier capitalism. Corruption. Steadily escalating police militarization. Soaring incarceration. Increasing internet censorship. And all while wealth and resources are taken from the people and poured toward global power agendas which do not benefit them, and which in fact impoverish them and endanger them as the empire’s “great power competition” against Russia and China rolls out economic warfare which empties their wallets and threatens their lives with nuclear brinkmanship.

These are all egregious assaults on our wellbeing which would not be tolerated except for our susceptibility to mass-scale psychological manipulation. We are propagandized into accepting a level of personal sacrifice more appropriate for bees and ants than for highly evolved mammals, all because our relationship with thought makes it hard for us to distinguish reality from narrative.

We’ve been manipulated into acting against our own self-interest to such an extent that we are now staring down the barrel of annihilation via nuclear war or environmental collapse. We are perilously close to becoming the first species on Earth to go extinct due to propaganda.

What this means is that in its short time on this planet our species has already reached the adapt-or-die juncture that every species eventually hits in a world of continually changing conditions. What makes our situation unique is that the changing conditions we’re encountering have been caused by us, and the adaptation we’re going to have to make is in our own minds.

Humans have the ability to dramatically alter their relationship with thought in a perceptual shift commonly referred to as spiritual enlightenment or awakening. The fact that this potential has been documented for thousands of years and exists within all of us is probably a clue as to what the invitation of this adapt-or-die juncture actually is. If humanity survives, it will be because something shifted in us which caused us to lose the sticky, entangled relationship with thought which made it so easy for ill-intentioned manipulators to drag us this way and that by our minds.

I actually believe we can make that jump, though I also suspect that we have the freedom to fail. If we make it, we can finally join our animal cousins in a way of living that isn’t dominated by mental narrative. And from there we can start building a world that benefits ourselves, and everyone else as well.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/20 ... -interest/

US Power Alliance Says It’s Preparing An “Information War” Against China

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In an article published last week titled “US working with ‘Five Eyes’ nations, Japan on information warfare,” a publication on military intelligence and communications technology called C4ISRNET reports that the US and its allies are collaborating “to share and sharpen information-warfare techniques in the Indo-Pacific” with the goal of “countering” the “increasingly aggressive China.”

Here’s an excerpt:

Dialogues and exchanges of best practices are ongoing with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and other countries including Japan, according to Vice Adm. Kelly Aeschbach, commander of Naval Information Forces.



“I want to say we have at least a dozen countries or so that are either establishing information warfare programs, or are interested in partnering further in the information warfare realm,” she said Feb. 15 at the West 2023 conference in San Diego. “We are leaning in there, we are focused.”



Japan, specifically, has expressed significant interest in information warfare, “in a really positive way,” Aeschbach told C4ISRNET. Japan and Australia, among others, are considered critical U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific, a region national security officials are invested in as they seek to counter an increasingly aggressive China.



Libertarian Institute’s Kyle Anzalone and Connor Freeman have a good write-up on this latest revelation in which they explain that information warfare is “a broad swath of military operations a country can use to disrupt another” which “can include spreading disinformation or preventing the spread of information.”

As Anzalone and Freeman note, one significant recent instance of the US government’s acknowledged use of information warfare was when US officials told NBC News that the US government has been deliberately circulating unsubstantiated information to western news media “as part of an information war against Russia.”

Which is to say, they lied. When you do things like telling New York Times reporters that “Russia asked China to give it military equipment and support for the war in Ukraine after President Vladimir V. Putin began a full-scale invasion last month,” only to have NBC report that you knew this claim “lacked hard evidence,” you lied. You used your country’s mass media institutions to circulate disinformation.


Which is of course standard operating procedure for the US empire; the mass media have always been propaganda institutions used to manufacture consent for the economic and geopolitical status quo upon which the media-owning class has built its empire. Propaganda is nothing new, including propaganda against China. The difference now is that empire managers are getting increasingly comfortable with publicly acknowledging this fact, probably because the notion that the west needs to fight its own “information war” against its enemies has been gaining increasingly widespread traction since 2016.

And as I keep reiterating, the bizarre thing about this belief is that the propaganda from empire-targeted governments has virtually zero existence in the western world, while western propaganda dominates our information ecosystem. Before RT was shut down it was drawing just 0.04 percent of the UK’s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” according to Facebook, while research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 election found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.” A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature.

So we can expect to see a multinational coordinated propaganda campaign against China, which could easily eclipse the anti-China propaganda campaign we’ve seen thus far, and could easily end up making the one against Russia look like child’s play.


It should infuriate everyone that our rulers are now flagrantly admitting that they manipulate our information environment to advance their own strategic interests. The only reason it doesn’t is because westerners are already so propagandized to the gills that the notion that our rulers should lie to us for our own good has gained so much traction that the empire can now openly imprison journalists for trying to tell us the truth.
In writing this practice is called “lampshading”, where you defuse any objection your audience might have to a glaring plot hole in your narrative by simply acknowledging that it’s there and then moving on. In this case the audience is every news-consuming person in the western world, and the narrative is the story the west has about itself.

Everything the western empire accuses its enemies of doing, it itself does far more egregiously. Westerners think of people in China as brainwashed victims of propaganda and censorship living in a power-serving homogenized information bubble, but that’s exactly what’s happening in our own society. And what’s worse, most westerners don’t even know it. And what’s even worse, they have the temerity to feel self-righteous about what free-thinking and free-speaking individualists they are compared to people in China.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/02/24 ... nst-china/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:02 pm

The Washington Post Is Coming for Your Retirement Benefits
CONOR SMYTH

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The Washington Post (2/5/23) warns that in 2034, when Social Security exhausts its reserves, “seniors face an immediate 25 percent cut in benefits.” Its solution to this problem: cutting benefits sooner, plus raising (regressive) payroll taxes.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades. What he did do was put it on steroids: Over the next three years, the Post doubled its web traffic and surpassed the New York Times in its volume of online postings. One result: The paper’s traditional hostility to federal retirement programs has become only more amplified.

As progressive economist Dean Baker (FAIR.org, 3/19/18) has written, “The Post calling for cuts to [Social Security and Medicare] is pretty much as predictable as the sun coming up”—it’s been up to this for decades, as Bezos is probably aware. So when it once again called for retirement benefit cuts on Sunday, February 5, Baker was unsurprised (Beat the Press, 2/5/23).

The Post came out swinging in the piece (2/5/23), with the headline “Yes, Social Security and Medicare Still Need to Be Reformed—and Soon.” It began by fretting over the depletion of the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare:

The longer Congress puts off fixes, the more painful they will become for the 66 million seniors, and growing, who receive monthly Social Security payments and the approximately 59 million people enrolled in a Medicare plan.

Among other solutions, the board suggested “raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 to match the existing Social Security retirement age for those born in 1960 or later.” As Baker pointed out (Beat the Press, 2/5/23):

As people who follow policy have long known, this would have little effect on the budget, since it would raise the amount spent on providing insurance in the ACA exchanges.

‘Bipartisan grand bargain’
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President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill got together in 1983 to pass a bipartisan plan that allowed working people to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy (Extra!, 3–4/97). (image: WAMU, 10/1/13)
But that was far from the worst of the Post’s suggestions. In the final paragraph of the editorial, the Post made its intentions even clearer. Attempting a call to action, the board wrote:

Mr. Biden was among 88 senators who voted in 1983 for a bipartisan grand bargain, negotiated by a commission led by Alan Greenspan and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, that rescued Social Security. Forty years later, if he and Republican leaders are willing to work in good faith, Mr. Biden could safeguard the greatest legacies of both the New Deal and the Great Society.

To translate: In 1983, Congress “rescued” Social Security by cutting it. The 1983 law did not change the actual age at which you can retire and draw Social Security benefits. It left that at 62. Instead, it simply said you’d get less money for retiring at any point before the new full retirement age, which reached 67 last year. For instance, those retiring at 62 today face a 50% larger cut in benefits for early retirement compared to before 2000.

The Post apparently remembers these reforms fondly. And it wants more.

‘Modest benefit adjustments’
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For the Washington Post (6/4/22), the US keeping retirement benefits at their current level is making “promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”
This is not the only time the editorial board has called for stiffing the seniors in recent months. Last year, the board published an editorial (6/4/22) headlined “The Medicare and Social Security Disaster That Washington Is Doing Nothing to Fix.” The board sounded the alarm: “The nation has made promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”

Before calling for “some mix of modest benefit adjustments and tax hikes” to shore up these earned benefit programs, the Post spent most of the piece attempting to instill fear in its readership about the latest projections for the finances of Social Security and Medicare. After laying out the numbers, the board wrote:

These numbers may seem small. They are not; total federal spending has historically hovered around 20% of GDP. The trustees are projecting a vast expansion of outlays for the elderly that would hollow out the government’s ability to spend on education, infrastructure, anti-poverty programs and other investments in children and working-age adults.

The Post quite explicitly places Social Security and Medicare in direct conflict with other government programs in this passage. But under even minor scrutiny, this idea of a zero-sum conflict between protecting elderly entitlement programs and investing in children falls apart.

Why can’t we spend more on social programs? The answer is—we can. According to a 2019 report from the University of New Hampshire, total government spending in the US, which sits at 38% of GDP, puts the US at 12th out of the 13 highest-income countries in the report.

The US does rank first in healthcare spending, but this is not because of largesse directed towards the elderly. Rather, it is a result of the brutally inefficient design of the US healthcare system, marked by administrative bloat and inflated prices.

As Baker observes (Beat the Press, 2/5/23), Medicare, which is much more efficient than private health plans, points to the solution, not the problem. In fact, studies have estimated that Medicare for All, a target of the Post’s vitriol in the past (1/27/16, 8/12/18, 5/4/19), would actually lower overall healthcare spending while improving health outcomes (Jacobin, 12/3/18).

What to do with resources
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Compared to high- and middle-income countries, the US spends far less of its GDP on social protection, and spends more on its military—and on its highly inefficient healthcare system (Carsey Research, Fall/19) .
When it comes to spending on social protection, which includes retirement programs for the elderly, the story is more straightforward. The US comes in last place among the highest-income countries. It spends 57% less per capita than the average in these countries. As the UNH report explains:

Social protection is the only spending category for which US spending is greatly lower than other countries. The difference explains how the United States can spend so much more than other countries on its military and health services while still spending so much less than other countries overall.

To portray Social Security cuts as necessary in light of this evidence is absurd.

What we’re really talking about when we’re discussing Social Security and Medicare is what we want to do with our resources as a country. We have more than enough wealth to provide solid retirement benefits and good medical care to the elderly. The question is: Do we want to do that? Or do we want to cut the programs that do those things? It’s really that simple.

It just so happens the Post favors cuts over human welfare. Exactly the kind of perspective Bezos deemed well worth putting his money behind.

https://fair.org/home/the-washington-po ... -benefits/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 26, 2023 3:26 pm

HOW THE EUROPEAN UNION PRESSURES AND CENSORS ALTERNATIVE MEDIA
Feb 24, 2023 , 1:56 p.m.

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The EU has developed a variety of tools to suppress voices critical of the status quo (Photo: File)

The media that offer an alternative vision to the large chains affiliated with the Atlantic catechism and report from a perspective of the Global South denouncing racism, war and inequality imposed by the capitalist system suffer pressure and censorship from the European Union (EU). The pressure from European politicians is such that some have had to close. The Redfish case is one of them.

"The relentless smear campaign by the mainstream media, academics and think tanks; censorship on social media and now state-sanctioned harassment have made it impossible for us to continue. Here's what happened to us, how we've been used as a test case in the EU's use of 'disinformation' weapons to silence critical voices, and why what we have been through is just the beginning of a crackdown that will affect everyone, including those who have encouraged and cheered the suppression of our work," Redfish said in a statement.

What methods are used to censor and who passes the filter? The large information chains constitute the "fact-checking community." The companies Meta, Twitter, Google, among others, as well as organizations such as the European External Action Service and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), are basically the sieve of what is published. The prominent players in the EU network of "fact checkers" are media such as RTVE (Spanish), DPA - according to Redfish , partially financed by German state media - and AFP, which follow the imposed script.

For EU politicians, any voice that says anything other than the script "undermines the European project" and endangers democracy. Anyone who publicly questions the current political and socio-economic order in the West is no longer entitled to EU and international legal protection, so they are treated as a threat.

Chains like Sputnik, RT, Redfish , among others, have been subjected to all of the EU's censorship tools, including warning labels, social media account restrictions, constant arbitrary removal of content that complies with the terms and conditions of platforms and hidden bans, almost always without appeal mechanisms.

https://misionverdad.com/como-presiona- ... ternativos

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 28, 2023 2:26 pm

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Meta Vs. Bolivia
February 27, 2023Bolivia
By Oscar Alfaro Shady, one of the so-called “Digital Warriors” now banned for life by Meta.

On February 23rd, Meta published a report of “adversary threats”, which is a euphemism to justify the massive removal of accounts in a country.

Bolivia became its latest victim. Without prior warning, 1,041 Facebook accounts, 450 Pages, 14 Groups and 130 Instagram accounts were deleted in December 2022. All the banned accounts belonged to supporters of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS-IPSP), the party of government. Those who have been banned have not been able to return. The excuse given is to accuse us of ‘coordinated inauthentic behavior’.

The basis of this report needs to be debunked. To begin with, the accusation of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is a concept based on convenience-oriented algorithms. However, such algorithms cannot discern simple social and group behavior. In the case of Bolivia, activists have utilized social media as a platform to provide an alternative to the national media which is dominated by right-wing groups.

So, under what criteria do Facebook security experts judge who is ‘independent media’, and who is not? Why are accounts that are verified with a national ID considered fake? Another accusation against us is that we have ‘mass reported’ false content reported by national media outlets and that the mass reporting is ‘evidence’ of our coordinated inauthentic behavior. Surely we have a right to report false content? Why is this a punishable offense? Nowhere in Meta’s conditions of service is it prohibited to flag news that one considers false.

Is Meta taking sides?

In Meta’s report justifying the censorship of our accounts, they claim that it’s to defend “members of the opposition”. However, Meta allows those same “members of the opposition” to publish hate speech and racial discrimination. They are an undemocratic minority that refuse to respect the outcome of the 2020 elections.

Meta has also accused us of operating “bunkers” to spread our message. Their evidence is that numerous accounts in the same location were posting similar messages. Meta needs to explain why it is irregular for 100 or more people across an entire city to voice support for a political ideology and search for related web pages. Is it illegal to be an activist online? Mark Zuckerberg himself has said: “Facebook was created to defend freedom of expression (..) to give everyone a voice, to empower the powerless and push society to be better, the services can be used by protesters and activists all over the world as it is supported by a strong encryption system and privacy protections.”

Despite what was written in the report, none of those who’ve been banned were hiding their real names. We had two-step verification with photo ID. In response, Meta has called us “Digital Warriors” a term that is only used in Bolivia by right-wing opposition groups to describe social activists. We have never hidden our personal political affiliation, indeed we are registered as members of the MAS-IPSP with our country’s electoral authority.

Double Standard

It should be emphasized that those of us who’ve been banned have not been given the right to download the content on our own pages, accumulated over years. This includes photos of our friends and family, photos that marked our youth and milestones in life. Facebook has always offered the option to download this content when they close an account for breaching the terms of service. We have been denied that right.

Meanwhile, the representatives of Facebook in Bolivia, Cisneros Interactive, are involved in numerous legal cases here, including the “Phantom Advertising” scandal where they’re accused of colluding with the right-wing governor of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to divert 700,000 Bs in public funds meant for Covid-19 information campaigns into political ads for their party.

Now comes the creepy part, Meta’s cyber intelligence officer, and one of the authors of this recent report, Mike Torrey, worked at the NSA from 2003 to 2006 when that agency spied on its own citizens and the entire planet. Torrey then went on to become a high-ranking official at the CIA from 2010 to 2018 , specializing in cyberwarfare against China, Russia, and other official enemies of the US State Department.

In Nicaragua in 2021, the same modus operandi was used when they removed accounts of hundreds of the country’s leading media outlets, journalists, and activists all of whom supported the leftist Sandinista government less than a week before the presidential elections. This campaign of censorship was led by Ben Nimmo who is the “Global Threat Intelligence Lead” at Meta. Nimmo served as a NATO press officer between 2011 and 2014, and the following year, he moved to the Institute for Statecraft, where they armed a UK government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. The Statecraft Institute where he established a secret network of journalists across Europe who were used to fuel anti-Russian narratives in the media.

An example of Nimmo’s election meddling is the UK general election of 2019. When the Labour Party published information about Conservative plans to privatize the NHS, Nimmo sprang into action, immediately announcing, without evidence, that the documents in question “sound very much like a well-known Russian operation”. The aim here was to confuse voters and divert attention from an issue that was damaging for the Conservative Party.

Justice

Bolivians are disturbed by the partisan manner in which Meta has censored our voices, without any due process or right to appeal. All we want is for our cases to be reviewed fairly, to be given a chance to prove that we are real people with years of our personal lives saved on the social network that we can now no longer access. We want justice.

https://kawsachunnews.com/meta-vs-bolivia
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 01, 2023 3:46 pm

It Is The Mass Media’s Job To Help Suppress Anti-War Movements

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In a new article titled “European antiwar protests gain strength as NATO’s Ukraine proxy war escalates,” The Grayzone’s Stavroula Pabst and Max Blumenthal document the many large demonstrations that have been occurring in France, the UK, Germany, Greece, Spain, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium and elsewhere opposing the western empire’s brinkmanship with Russia and proxy warfare in Ukraine.

Pabst and Blumenthal conclude their report with a denouncement of the way the western media have either been ignoring or sneering at these protests while actively cheerleading smaller demonstrations in support of arming Ukraine.

“When Western media has not ignored Europe’s antiwar protest wave altogether, its coverage has alternated between dismissive and contemptuous,” they write. “German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle sneeringly characterized the February 25 demonstration in Berlin as ‘naive’ while providing glowing coverage to smaller shows of support for the war by the Ukrainian diaspora. The New York Times, for its part, mentioned the European protests in just a single generic line buried in an article on minuscule anti-Putin protests held by Russian emigres.”

This bias is of course blatantly propagandistic, which won’t surprise anyone who understands that the mainstream western media exist first and foremost to administer propaganda on behalf of the US-centralized empire. And chief among their propaganda duties is to suppress the emergence of a genuine peace movement.


As we’ve discussed previously, it has never in human history been more urgent to have a massive, forceful protest movement in opposition to the empire’s rapidly accelerating trajectory toward a global conflict against Russia and China. Other peace movements have arisen in the past in response to horrific wars which would go on to claim millions of lives, but a world war in the Atomic Age could easily wind up killing billions, and must never be allowed to happen.

And yet the public is not treating this unparalleled threat with the urgency it deserves. A few protests here and there is great, but it’s not nearly enough. And the reason the people have not answered the call is because the mass media have been successfully propagandizing them into accepting the continuous escalations toward world war that we’ve been seeing.

People aren’t going to protest what their government is doing if they believe that what their government is doing is appropriate, and the only reason so many people believe what their government is doing with regard to Russia and China is appropriate is because they have been propagandized into thinking so.

The mass media are not telling the public about the many well-documented western provocations which led to the war in Ukraine and sabotaged peace at every turn; they’re just telling everyone that Putin invaded because he’s an evil Hitler sequel who loves killing and hates freedom. The mass media are not telling the public about the way the US empire has been encircling China with war machinery in ways it would never permit itself to be encircled while deliberately staging incendiary provocations in Taiwan; they’re just telling everyone that China is run by evil warmongering tyrants. The mass media are not reminding the public that after the fall of the Soviet Union the US empire espoused a doctrine asserting that the rise of any foreign superpower must be prevented at all cost; they’re letting that agenda fade into the memory hole.

Because people believe Russia and China are the sole aggressors and the US and its allies are only responding defensively to those unprovoked aggressions, they don’t see the need for a mass protest movement against their own governments. If you tell the average coastal American liberal that you’re holding a protest about the war in Ukraine, they’re going to assume you mean you’re protesting against Putin, and they’ll look at you strangely if you tell them you’re actually protesting your own government’s aggressions.


The narrative that Russia and China are acting with unprovoked aggression actually prevents peace, because if your government isn’t doing anything to make things worse, then there’s nothing it can change about its own behavior to make things better. But of course there is a massive, massive amount that the western power alliance can change about its own behavior with regard to Russia and China that would greatly improve matters. Instead of working to subordinate the entire planet to the will of Washington and its drivers, they can work toward de-escalation, diplomacy and detente.

We’re not going to get de-escalation, diplomacy and detente unless the people use the power of their numbers to demand those things, and the people are not going to use the power of their numbers to demand those things as long as they are successfully propagandized not to. This means propaganda is the ultimate problem that needs to be addressed. Ordinary people can only address it by waking the public up to the fact that the political/media class are lying to them about what’s happening with Russia and China, using whatever means we have access to.

So that’s what we need to do. We need to fight the imperial disinformation campaign using information. Tell people the truth using every medium available to us to sow distrust in the imperial propaganda machine, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you.

Our rulers are always babbling about how they’re fighting an “information war” against enemy nations, but in reality they’re fighting an information war against normal westerners like us. So we must fight back. We need to cripple public trust in the propaganda machine and begin awakening one another from our propaganda-induced sleep, so that we can begin organizing against the horrific end they are driving us toward.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/01 ... movements/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 03, 2023 3:46 pm

Sinister Agency Created To Do CIA’s Dirty Work in Public Has Just Named New Leaders
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - March 2, 2023 0

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NED welcomes Congressman Joaquin Castro, Dr. Amaney A. Jamal, and Senator Todd Young to Board of Directors. [Source: ned.org]

New Appointees Picked to Pursue Same Imperialist Goal of Fomenting Disruption and Regime Change in Countries that Won’t Toe U.S. Line
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is an innocently named, “wolf-in-sheep’s clothing” offshoot of the CIA that funds dissident foreign organizations and media trying to overthrow their own governments in countries targeted by the U.S. for regime change.

In February, the NED announced as new board members Democratic Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, Indiana Republican Senator Todd Young, and Princeton University Dean Amaney A. Jamal.

But the new members will eagerly follow the old CIA playbook, which is precisely why they were appointed.

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[Source: covertactionmagazine.com]

Castro’s selection is a particularly clever one, the perfect choice to cloak the NED with a progressive veneer since he is known for opposing Donald Trump’s immigration policy and supporting the rights of Mexicans living in the U.S. as a six-term congressman from San Antonio, where he also founded a large literacy campaign and book drive.

Paradoxically, Castro is a gung-ho supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which led to mass migration from Mexico because the loosening of trade restrictions allowed for cheap U.S. imports into Mexico that destroyed its agricultural sector.

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Democratic Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro. [Source: dallasnews.com]

In December 2020, Castro narrowly lost in a bid to become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

He was endorsed by 50 progressive organizations, including the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, who believed that Castro “demonstrated a strong commitment to bringing a diversity of voices into discussions on foreign policy” and “embodied a progressive vision for the U.S. in the world which prioritized diplomacy and multilateralism over militarism.”

Castro indeed spoke out against U.S. sanctions on Iran and called to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. However, he has also endorsed a near trillion-dollar military budget enshrined in the 2022 NDAA and advanced disinformation in support of a U.S. regime change operation in Syria by claiming that the Bashar al-Assad government had carried out a chemical gas attack in Douma.

Castro further praised the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as “the single most important military alliance that has set the foundation for national security in the last 70 years,” and adopted a hawkish stance on Ukraine, calling for extending the Russia sanctions to the social and cultural realm by “making sure that sporting organizations and other American organizations [and] international organizations aren’t doing any kind of business or work in Russia.”

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Joaquin Castro is a regular guest and guest host on MSNBC. [Source: youtube.com]

In a statement on his website, Castro remarked: “The world must send a powerful message that Vladimir Putin’s brutality against Ukraine has left Russia isolated on the international stage. I applaud the important steps that the International Olympic Committee, FIFA, Eurovision, and other groups have taken to bar Russia from participating in their events, but the people of Ukraine deserve a coordinated response. I strongly urge the Biden administration to work with our allies to stop international sporting and cultural revenues and accolades from flowing to Russia. Putin’s criminal regime must continue to pay a high price for the invasion of Ukraine.”

This statement must have attracted the notice of the NED, which has enthusiastically supported the war in Ukraine and provided extensive support to civil society groups in Russia opposing Vladimir Putin.

An archived webpage from February 25, 2022, since deleted, showed that the NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 and that date.

Image
[Source: mronline.org]

This aid was crucial in supporting the 2014 Maidan coup that toppled pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and set the groundwork for the war that followed.

In Castro’s view of events, “Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine” was the “culmination of a pattern of aggression against its neighbors, including the agitation of separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and a war against Georgia in 2008.”

CAM has amply documented, however, that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was triggered when Ukraine stepped up military attacks on eastern Ukraine, whose people voted for greater regional autonomy following the 2014 U.S. backed coup, and that U.S. provocations were part of a geopolitical scheme to bog down Russia in a quagmire, bankrupt its economy and cause civil unrest that would lead to the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.

Russia also was never an aggressor in Georgia—an EU investigation determined that Georgia had provoked the 2008 conflict after the U.S. sponsored a color revolution that brought to power neo-conservative Mikheil Saakashvili, who launched an indiscriminate assault on South Ossetia.

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Castro is ignorant of the true causes of the Georgia war, reflexively blaming Russia, which is what the CIA wants everyone to believe. [Source: youtube.com]

Rockefeller’s Man on China

Castro’s wrong-headed views about Russia run parallel with his outlook toward China. In June 2021, he sponsored legislation that was designed to monitor and address China’s alleged censorship and intimidation strategies affecting Americans and American businesses.

Castro claimed in a statement that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was “weaponizing access to its domestic economy to restrict the ability of Americans to freely express themselves. From Hollywood and the National Basketball Association to U.S. hotels and airlines, China’s bullying of Americans with intimidation and censorship is unacceptable and must be held accountable.”

However, Americans were the ones bullying China when they a) encircled it militarily, b) armed its historic adversary, Taiwan, to the teeth and sent Special Forces there, c) denounced China in international forums, and d) blamed China unfairly for starting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Castro’s remarks fit with a Sinophobic discourse—prevalent as much among Democrats as Republicans—lending support for a further ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia and which have caused a spike in domestic hate crimes against Asian-Americans.

Evidence of Castro’s close alignment with the interests of the CIA was apparent in his being hosted by the Asia Society in October 2018.

The Asia Society is a CIA-front organization that promotes U.S. imperial intervention in the Asia-Pacific, often through soft power. Castro was introduced at his talk by Charles Rockefeller, whose oil-stained family helped found the Asia Society years earlier.

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Charles Rockefeller [Source: asiasociety.org]

After he took to the podium, Castro thanked the Rockefeller family for their years of philanthropy and support for the Asia Society, which he said had helped “forge important alliances for the U.S. in Asia.”

These alliances included some of the region’s most sordid dictatorships (Suharto, Marcos, Rhee, Diem, Thieu-Ky), which provided the Rockefeller family with huge oil revenues, though Castro of course left this out.

Castro advocated a “compete, not cheat” strategy toward China, insinuating like Donald Trump and Joe Biden that China was the one cheating.

However, the U.S. was the country that engaged in currency manipulation of the Chinese renminbi by pressuring for its devaluation, and which spied on and tried to sabotage Chinese companies, like telecommunications giant Huawei, whose CEO was arrested in Vancouver under fraudulent pretexts.[1]

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Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou was arrested under fraudulent pretexts as part of the U.S. economic war on China that Castro supports. [Source: trtworld.com]

Castro said that he supported U.S. policing of the South China Sea to counter alleged Chinese aggression over strategic islands, to which China actually had a legitimate historical claim.

According to Castro, countries like Vietnam looked to the U.S. to secure freedom of navigation on the South China Sea—forgetting the history of the Vietnam War and the fact that the sea was called South China and not United States sea.

At the end of his talk, Castro advocated for robust U.S. global leadership in standing up to autocracy and promoting human rights, stating that, while the U.S. “couldn’t fight every battle, there were ‘humanitarian crises’ that called to us and where we should act where we can.”

These views correlate well with the NED’s mission, which is to publicize human rights abuses in countries that the U.S. targets for regime change and to help lay the groundwork for military intervention, color revolutions and coup d’états that are rationalized on “humanitarian grounds.”

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[Source: globaltimes.cn]

Following in the Footsteps of an NED Luminary
Todd Young, a Republican Senator from Indiana since 2017, is another appropriate choice to join the NED’s board because of his bellicose position toward China and expertise in the transition from centrally planned economies to free markets in Eastern Europe—which the NED has long supported.[2]

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Todd Young [Source: wikipedia.org]

Young, after working for The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, became in 2001 an aide to Richard Lugar (D-IN), a member of the NED’s Board of Directors from 1992 to 2001. The keynote speaker at the 1972 Republican National Convention which re-nominated Richard Nixon for president, Lugar helped the NED to establish the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), promoting “independent media” in foreign countries that advanced the U.S. line on foreign affairs.

In 2001, Lugar, who had a background in Navy intelligence and was a staunch supporter of free-trade agreements that harmed American workers, was awarded the NED’s Democracy Service Medal for his lifelong contribution to the “cause of democracy and human freedom.”

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Senator Richard G. Lugar [Source: thelugarcenter.org]

Between 1985-1987 and 2003-2007, Lugar served as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he provided a “reliable vote for President Bush on the Iraq War,” the greatest foreign policy disaster of the last generation.

Young followed his mentor by supporting more foreign policy disasters, endorsing the provision of billions of dollars of U.S. military aid to Ukraine, the ratcheting up of sanctions directed against Russia, and escalation of military provocations directed at China.

On February 8, 2023, Young promoted a bill with Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA) to strengthen U.S. diplomatic efforts to end the conflict between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Tibet.

While noble in theory, the bill was deceptive in suggesting that the PRC was the aggressor, when historically the CIA had supported the rebellion of the Tibetan lamas in order to destabilize China.

Young was generally a proponent of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy approach to China, stating that “helping Taiwan shore up its defenses to thwart the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions must be a top U.S. national security priority.”

This accords well with the ideological vision of the NED which has worked for decades to support right-wing anti-communist dissidents within China, and has had “an enduring and profound relationship with Taiwan,” to quote NED President Damon Wilson, when the UN considers Taiwan to be part of the Chinese mainland.[3]

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NED President Damon Wilson with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen in March 2022. [Source: english.president.gov.tw]
Ties Between the CIA and Academia

The appointment of Dr. Amaney Jamal, the dean of Princeton’s prestigious School of Public and International Affairs, embodies the long-standing link between Ivy League academics and the NED.

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Amaney Jamal [Source: politics.princeton.edu]

At the NED’s inaugural conference, Harvard Professor and former National Security Council (NSC) staffer Samuel Huntington spoke about a new “third wave of democracy,” that he said the U.S. was in a strong position to try to advance.

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Samuel P. Huntington [Source: facebook.com]

The daughter of Palestinian immigrants who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2003, Amaney Jamal is an acolyte of Huntington. Her book, Of Citizens and Empires: Pro-American Democracy or No Democracy at All? (Princeton University Press, 2012) tries to analyze how and why Huntington’s esteemed “third wave” did not extend to the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s, focusing considerably on how anti-American sentiments undermined democratic development and hampered U.S. democracy promotion efforts because the U.S. feared bringing anti-American groups to power if there were genuine democracy.

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[Source: amazon.com]

While there is some merit to her argument, Jamal’s book does not address in any depth the damaging effects of U.S. imperial intervention. She considers U.S. democracy promotion efforts as sincere around the world and neglects U.S. support for Islamists in Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. She also gives weight to the view of those who believe that U.S. hegemony is essential in bringing international investment, security and economic development, confining her study primarily to Jordan and Kuwait where people are most likely to hold this latter view.

Jamal furthermore can be seen as adopting an ethnocentric framework in the assumption that the money-saturated U.S.-style political democracy is the highest form of political development. The book fails in turn to shed light on indigenous Arab political traditions that might well be effectively reinvigorated.

Jamal’s academic framework, however, accords with that of the NED in striving to promote the American political model in the Middle East—whether the people of the region want it or not—and in her assumption that that model is good for everyone.

As a bonus, the NED gets the first Arab-American woman on its board who has written studies on the discrimination of Arab-Americans after 9/11 and could make future inroads in the Middle East.

She and Castro help to give the NED a progressive veneer by presenting a diverse face to the public. But that diversity is mostly superficial because Jamal’s and Castro’s worldview reinforces that of the white men who have traditionally managed and run the U.S. Empire.


1.See William F. Engdahl, Target China: How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon (Progressive Press, 2014); A.B. Abrams, China and America’s Tech War: From AI to 5G: The Struggle to Shape the Future of World Order (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022). ↑

2.Young served as a Congressman from 2011-2017. ↑

3.In August 2022, the spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said: “The policy of the United Nations on [the Taiwan issue] is that we are guided by General Assembly Resolution 2758 from 1971 on one-China,” which expelled the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the UN. Chiang Kai-shek had established a dictatorship in Taiwan, with U.S. backing, after he fled China following the defeat of the Guomindang in China’s civil war in 1949. For the previous four years, Taiwan had been restored to Chinese sovereignty after a long period of occupation by the Japanese. ↑

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 04, 2023 5:40 pm

Reality Based People Can Fact Check The 'Fact-Checkers'

Stavroula Pabst, a writer in Greece, has published an interesting piece on the nefarious purpose of fact-checking and 'dis-information' debunking.

Guy Debord’s Warning of “The Role of the Expert”: A Philosophical Perspective on the Rise of Fact-Checking

The piece explains this by going back to the writings of the French philosopher Guy Debord and his musings about 'spectacles'.

While anti-disinformation efforts proliferate, what’s missing from the conversation is a discussion about power. Of course, the powerful have reasons for wanting to combat what they consider to be “disinformation” — they want their version of the truth to become ours. Many commentators observe as such, noting that so-called disinformation researchers, fact-checkers, and experts are often partisan in nature, and themselves frequently disseminate things that are not true.

Basically, anyone calling themselves a “misinformation expert” or “disinformation reporter” is a partisan fraud, trying to make their activism seem scientific: https://t.co/5gbDf2WJoD

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 21, 2022

But a larger force is at work within the rise of fact-checking and other counter-disinformation efforts. That force is our society’s current arrangement of appearances, the totality of social relations mediated by images, or spectacle. Spectacle, as elucidated in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, is a concept that can help us to understand seemingly unconnected, yet deeply intertwined phenomena that have come to fruition as the economy has subjugated society to its needs (as opposed to the other way around), and thus recover our ability to experience life directly.

As its dominance over our everyday lives grows complete, the spectacle has become powerful enough to turn our understanding of what is true upside down. Because spectacle replaces real life with a mere mediated representation of life that cannot be experienced directly, it provides a framework where mass deceptions and lies can consistently and convincingly appear as true. Thus, spectacle is perhaps one of the most effective tools we have to explain how elite deceptions, including fabrications and lies about imperialist wars like those in Iraq and Syria, can consistently go unpunished and even unnoticed. As such, it follows that spectacle can help us understand how modern fact-checks and counter-disinformation initiatives can consistently do the opposite of what they claim, as many have observed.


In Germany one provider of the daily spectacle is the premier news program of public TV, 'Die Tagesschau'. It has an online presence which includes a section for 'fact checking' deceptively called Faktenfinder - fact finder.

Its current main purpose is to promote the NATO war in Ukraine and to blame Russia for waging it.

It is quite embarrassing to read its highly manipulative pieces. Last week though it topped its usual nonsense with a mistake that exposed it to a wider audience and led to lots of taunts and jeering.

Its main writer was tasked with debunking Symour Hersh's piece about the U.S. terror attack on the Nord Stream pipeline. Not being sufficiently capable of understanding the original English text, the writer used Google Translate to convert it to German. Google Translate is quite good if you need some base to work from but it is far from perfect:

Image

The original sentence in question:

That would be well within the range of the divers, who, operating from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter, would dive with a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium streaming from their tanks, and plant shaped C4 charges on the four pipelines with concrete protective covers.
The 'translation':

Das wäre gut im Bereich der Taucher, die von einem norwegischen Minenjäger der Alta-Klasse aus mit einer Mischung aus Sauerstoff, Stickstoff und Helium tauchen würden, die aus ihren Tanks strömt, und pflanzenförmigen C4-Ladungen auf den vier Pipelines mit Betonschutz Abdeckungen.
The descriptive "plant shaped C4 charges" had become "pflanzenförmigen C4-Ladungen" which I would translate back into English as "plant like C4 explosives" or "C4 explosives formed like plants".

The verb 'to plant' had suddenly turned into the noun 'the plant'. But outside of the spectacle, in reality, "C4 explosives formed like plants" do not make sense.

So what did the fact-finder do? He could have turned to a different site like Deepl which, in this case, produces a correct translation. Or he could have turned to the original English text to recheck that sentence. He would have found that without the verb 'plant' it would have no other one and would make no grammatical sense.

But that is not what he did. His task was to reinforce the spectacle, to hide the truth of Hersh's report. He thus called a German explosives expert and asked him about "C4 explosives formed like plants". The expert (he actually is one) knew of course that there were no such explosives and that camouflaging pipeline explosives as plants would not make sense to anyone. He responded in length and thus helped to debunked the alleged Hersh claim.

The fact finder writer was happy to learn that explosives formed like plants do not make sense. He wrote that up and published it.

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The headline says "Further Discrepancies in Hersh Report", the sub-headline "Explosives formed like plants are unlikely".

My back-translation:

The details related to the detonations are also not clear. Hersh writes the divers had placed the C4 plastic explosives "in form of plants onto the 4 pipelines with concrete protected covers".

That is of course not what Hersh wrote but what a cognition challenged fact-checker with rudimentary English skills made of a report written in that language.

A few hours after it the 'fact finding' piece was published the German Twitter world erupted in laughter.

Someone contacted the explosives expert who had been quoted in that piece. He of course was embarrassed when he learned that his musings about 'explosives formed like plants' were caused by a false translation. He contacted the fact finder which only then corrected the error.

The whole 'plant based' part was removed from the piece but no remark or explanation was attached to it. That can only be found on a separate correction page where it is simply noted as 'translation error'.

The spectacle lost that one when itself got debunked by people who live in reality and talk to each other.

As Stavroula Pabst concludes in her piece:

The spectacle’s totality of domination over our lives is an amazing yet shocking feat that forces those recognizing the phenomenon to reckon with the “un-lives” we live. Thus, while “ignorance knows… it has nothing to say,” overriding and dismantling the spectacle requires finding something to say: as Debord writes, a “practical force must be set in motion.”
This “practical force” needs the meaningful dialogue that spectacle’s creep into our lives has largely eliminated, if not wholly erased, via phenomena including today’s fact-checking and anti-disinformation crazes. And that dialogue and communication cannot be initiated by atomized individuals or by lonely crowds susceptible to spectacle’s influence, but by people who share community and a meaningful connection to what Debord describes as “universal history,” “where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.”


And that is perhaps what this Moon of Alabama is about.

Despite all the pessimism that nothing ever changes I continue to believe that a steady uncovering of spectacle nonsense, and talking about it, will over time change things - even if only a bit.

Posted by b on March 3, 2023 at 18:11 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/03/r ... .html#more
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 07, 2023 3:59 pm

Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Stream Scoop Too Hot to Handle
DAVID KNOX
Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Stream Scoop Too Hot to Handle


Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.
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The British news agency Reuters (2/9/23) ran at least ten stories on Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream report; the US AP didn’t run one.
But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:

The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.

Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.

More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.

News blackout
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The online magazine Newsweek (2/8/23) was one of the few notable US outlets to cover Hersh’s report as a news story.
What’s not in doubt is the remarkable breadth of the news blackout surrounding Hersh’s story. The only major US newspaper to cover it as breaking news was the New York Post (2/8/23).

It did appear on the opinion pages—but not the news columns—of two major dailies. The Los Angeles Times (2/11/23) mentioned Hersh’s story in the 11th paragraph of a weekly round-up by the letters editor. On the New York Times opinion page (2/15/23), Ross Douthat included Hersh in a column headlined “UFOs and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time.”

Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson (2/8/23) and Laura Ingraham (2/14/23) collectively gave Hersh’s story a few minutes on their cable TV shows, but their network didn’t post a news story. On Fox News Sunday (2/19/23), National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Hersh’s claims. But, again, Fox News didn’t do a separate news report.

Newsweek (2/8/23) has covered the story , but focusing mainly on White House denials and Russia’s reaction. Bloomberg News (2/9/23) ran a four-paragraph follow-up that also stressed the Russian response, but provided no details of Hersh’s account of the bombing.

The Washington Post’s first mention of the story (2/22/23) came two weeks after it was posted. Again, Russian reaction was the hook, as seen in the headline: “Russia, Blaming US Sabotage, Calls for UN Probe of Nord Stream.”

‘Discredited journalist’
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Focusing on a story’s acceptance by an official enemy (Business Insider, 2/9/23) is a good tactic for promoting unquestioning rejection of information that challenges official narratives.
Arguably the most influential coverage of Hersh’s story came from Business Insider (2/9/23), which posted what can justly be called a hit piece, given its blatantly loaded headline: “The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline Is Proving a Gift to Putin.”

The Business Insider article was picked up by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23). It also was the primary source of an article in Snopes (2/10/23), the only major factchecking site to weigh in on Hersh’s claims. But Snopes, which bills itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” didn’t check any disputed facts. Instead, it starts with an ad hominem attack, asking “Who is Seymour Hersh?”

Snopes answers that rhetorical question by summarizing his body of work—uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, revealing the secret bombing in Cambodia and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—but emphasizing that “his later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.”

Snopes’ presentation is hardly even-handed. No defenders of Hersh are cited in the four-paragraph overview of his work, which includes seven hyperlinks to sources. That looks impressive. But clicking on the links reveals four are to the same source: the Business Insider hit piece.

Snopes’ failure to acknowledge multiple links to the same source isn’t just sloppy, it’s misleading, because most readers don’t check to see if the same source is cited repeatedly.

It’s likely Snopes used the Business Insider piece a fifth time—the last without attribution. The Snopes article’s final sentence states: “Hersch [sic] was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, ‘It’s a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what’s going on.’ ”

The Business Insider piece ends with a paragraph with the same misspelling of Hersh’s name, the same TASS link and identical—word for word — translation of his response. (It doesn’t help Snopes’ credibility as a factchecker that Hersh’s name was originally misspelled two other times in the article.)

Much of the remainder of Snopes’ article consists of quotes from Hersh’s story, followed by commentary disparaging Hersh’s reliance on a single, unnamed source. Since that’s something Hersh readily acknowledges, it’s hard to see the informational value of the Snopes article.

Competition, not just critics
While several bloggers have challenged details in Hersh’s account, no news outlet has answered the only question that matters: Who blew up the pipeline?

Waiting for official explanations appears to be a dead end. Sweden, Denmark and Germany have launched investigations, but have not indicated when—or if—results would be released.

The giants of US journalism—the New York Times, Washington Post and the major broadcast networks—have the resources to try and solve the mystery. And it’s certainly possible that one or more of them are working to do just that. But the pipelines were destroyed five months ago. Since then, Seymour Hersh is the only journalist to offer an explanation of who was responsible.

There should be others. Hersh needs competition, not just critics.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 08, 2023 2:49 pm

Australian Media Are Outright Telling Us They Are Feeding Us War Propaganda About China

Image

The mass media in Australia have been churning out brazen propaganda pieces to manufacture consent for war with China, and what’s interesting is that they’re basically admitting to doing this deliberately.

Australians are uniquely susceptible to propaganda because we have the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. Both of those media megacorporations have recently put out appalling propaganda pieces about the need for Australians to rapidly prepare to go to war with China in defense of Taiwan, and in both of those instances have straightforwardly told their audiences that there’s an urgent need to effect a psychological change in the way all Australians think about this war.

Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have been busy flooding the media with testimony from a panel of war machine-funded “experts” who say Australia must hasten to get ready to join the United States in a hot war with China in the next three years. Yesterday’s dual front-page propaganda assault featured imagery of Chinese war planes flying straight at the reader, awash in red and emblazoned with the words “RED ALERT” to help everyone understand how evil and communist China is.


“Today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Age front-page stories on Australia’s supposed war risk with China represents the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life,” former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating opined in response to the publications.

“Apart from the outrageous illustrations of jet aircraft being shown leaving a profiled red-coloured map of China, the extent of the bias and news abuse is, I believe, unparalleled in modern Australian journalism,” he added.

In the first installment of their “Red Alert” propaganda series, SMH and The Age share that their empire-funded panelists believe there’s a need to bring about a “psychological shift” in the public’s attitude toward war with China, with one panelist asserting that “the nation’s leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion” about the need to prepare for that war.

In the second “Red Alert” installment, this same message is repeated, saying that “Australia’s vulnerabilities are not only physical, but psychological,” and again repeating the need to get everyone talking and thinking about the possibility of war with China.

“It is a real national taboo to think about the likelihood of a conflict in anything other than the most remotely theoretical perspective,” says Peter Jennings of the war machine-funded propaganda firm Australian Strategic Policy Institute, countering that “we will sleepwalk into disaster unless we openly discuss unpalatable scenarios.”

Saying that the real threat is “complacency rather than alarmism,” think tanker Lavina Lee urges Australia to confront “the possibility that we might go to war and what would happen either way. We should talk about what the world would look like if we win and what it would look like if we lose.”

Over and over again they are telling us that something must be done to change the way Australians think and talk about a war with China, in articles designed to change the way Australians think and talk about war with China. They are doing the exact thing they say must be done, while explaining why it needs to be done. They are brainwashing us with propaganda while explaining why it is necessary to brainwash us with propaganda.


Last month Murdoch’s Sky News Australia released an astonishingly propagandistic hour-long special titled “China’s aggression could start new world war,” which in its attempts to show “China’s aggression” hilariously flashed a graphic of all the US military operations currently encircling China. The segment features footage of bayonet-wielding Chinese forces overdubbed with ominous cinematic Bad Guy music, and in Sky News’ promotions for the special all the footage from China was tinged red to help viewers understand how evil and communist China is.

Toward the end of the special, Sky News’ empire-backed “experts” tell their audience that Australia needs to double its military spending, and that those in power need to explain to them why this is so important.

“I think it is important that we are having a conversation with the Australian people which makes it clear that we live in a world which is more fragile than we have for a very long period of time,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles tells Sky News in the special. “And what that is going to require is a defense posture and a defense force which is in truth gonna cost more than it has in the past. We’re gonna need to increase our defense spending.”

“The Australian government needs to talk to the Australian people about the kinds of threats it faces,” says Mick Ryan, a war machine-funded think tanker who features in both the Sky News special and the Nine Entertainment series.

“It needs a more compelling narrative to convince the Australian people that they need to spend more on defense,” Ryan adds.

A “more compelling narrative”. There it is, in black and white.

Again, they’re saying there’s a desperate need to explain to Australians why they need to make sacrifices to prepare for war with China, while explaining to Australians that they need to make sacrifices to prepare for war with China. They are openly telling us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, while filling our heads with propaganda.

They’re not just filling our minds with war propaganda, they are openly telling us that war propaganda is good for us.


The aforementioned second installment of Nine Entertainment’s “Red Alert” propaganda series is titled “The first 72 hours: How an attack on Taiwan could rapidly reach Australia,” and this one features the image of a lone Australian soldier bravely standing against a sky that has been consumed by the red Chinese flag.

This latest propaganda piece says that in the event of a hot war with China, our nation may be struck with intercontinental ballistic missiles, we may find ourselves cut off from the world while the fuel supplies we rely on dry up in a matter of weeks, and we may find our infrastructure rendered useless by massive Chinese cyberattacks. The empire-funded “experts” acknowledge that this will not be because China is just randomly hostile to Australia, but because we are a US military and intelligence asset who will support the US empire in its war:

But why would China use its limited resources to attack Australia instead of focusing solely on seizing Taiwan? Because of the strategically crucial role Australia is expected to play for the United States in the conflict.



“Our geography means we are a southern base for the Americans for what comes next,” Ryan says. “That’s how they’re seeing us. They want our geography. They want us to build bases for several hundred thousand Americans in due course like in World War II.”

Interestingly, the article contains a rare acknowledgement in the mainstream press that the presence of the American surveillance base Pine Gap makes Australia a legitimate target for ICBMs:

“Distance is no longer equivalent to safety from our strategic perspective,” [Peter Jennings] says. In the first three days of a war, he says Beijing would be tempted to target Australian military bases with a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile attack to minimise our usefulness in the conflict.

“If China seriously wants to go after Taiwan in a military sense, the only way they can really contemplate quick success is to pre-emptively attack those assets that might be a threat to them. That means Pine Gap goes,” he says, referring to the top secret US-Australian base in the Northern Territory that the US uses to detect nuclear missile launches.

(Fun fact: the US and the UK staged a coup in Australia in the seventies because the prime minister was threatening to close down Pine Gap.)



At no time is it ever suggested that the fact that going to war with China could cost Australia its shipping lanes and infrastructure and even get us nuked means we should probably reconsider this grand plan of going to war with China. At no time is it ever suggested that riding Washington’s bloodsoaked coattails into World War Three against our primary trading partner might not be a good idea. At no time is it ever suggested that de-escalation, diplomacy and detente might be a better approach than rapidly increasing militarism and brinkmanship.

And at no time is it ever suggested that we should reconsider our role as a US military/intelligence asset, despite the open admission that this is exactly what is endangering us. We’re not being told to prepare for war with China because China is going to attack us, we’re being told to prepare for war with China because our masters in DC are planning to drag us into one. We’re not being told to prepare for war to defend ourselves, we’re being told to prepare for war because our rulers plan to attack China.

We see this in the way Australia is assembling its war machinery, buying up air-to-ground missiles that cannot possibly be used defensively because their sole purpose is for taking out an enemy nation’s air defenses. We see it in the way Australia is buying up sea mines, which as journalist Peter Cronau has noted is less suitable for protecting our 34,000 km of coastline than for blockading the shipping lanes of an enemy nation you wish to lay siege to. We see it in the fact that China’s military budget remains steady at around one and-a-half percent of its GDP, while the US spends 3.4 percent and Australia is being persuaded to double our share from two to four percent.

We’re not being prepared for a war to defend ourselves, we’re being prepared for a war of aggression to secure US unipolar hegemony — one that has been in the works for many years. We must resist this, and we must resist the tsunami of mass media propaganda that is designed to manufacture our consent for it.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/08 ... out-china/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 09, 2023 3:47 pm

US ARMY INTENDS TO USE 'DEEPFAKES' IN PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS
8 Mar 2023 , 11:50 a.m.

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Video manipulation is projected as the new US weapon to deploy psychological warfare (Photo: File)

The US Army's Special Operations Command, responsible for some of the nation's most secretive military efforts, is preparing to fuel Internet propaganda and deception campaigns using deepfakes, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept .

The plans, which also describe the hacking of Internet-connected eavesdropping devices in order to gauge the susceptibility of foreign populations to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated "disinformation" campaigns, their effectiveness and the ethics of its use.

Responsible for carrying out the undertaking would be the Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, an unprecedented instance of the US government openly signaling its desire to use controversial technology offensively.

"When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon shouldn't fight fire with fire," Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution's Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told the outlet, adding that the use of deepfakes should be subject to "review and supervision".

SOCOM's next-generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists the capabilities it is looking for in the near future and solicits proposals from outside parties who believe they can build them.

When SOCOM launched the project, in 2020, it established a next-generation "toy wish list" for the 21st century special forces commando, which basically constituted a compendium of futuristic gadgets and tools that will help the country's soldiers in a more You more effectively hunt down and kill your targets by using lasers, robots, holograms and other sophisticated hardware . Obviously it was all a hoax.

https://misionverdad.com/ejercito-estad ... icologicas

Google Translator

*****

They Work So Hard To Manufacture Our Consent Because They Absolutely Require It

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Australian media are awash with reporting on the war-with-China propaganda series by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that I’ve been writing about for the last few days. Which is really quite extraordinary, because it’s not an actual news story.

It really isn’t. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age just asked five warmongering China hawks what they think about war with China, wrote down their very predictable answers saying Australia must prepare for war with China within three years, and then passed it off as journalism. Obviously if you ask a bunch of China hawks if they think Australia should prepare for war with China they’re going to tell you yes; that’s not news, that’s just you reporting that five random warmongers think warmongery thoughts.

Yet SMH and The Age stretched this ridiculous non-story into a multi-part series titled “Red Alert” — all without ever noting the massive conflict of interest posed by the extensive ties its “panel” of “experts” have to US-aligned governments and the military industrial complex — and now it’s being covered like a real news story by the rest of Australian media. TV news segments have filled the airwaves reporting on the opinions of the most wildly biased people you could possibly find on this subject, the most appalling of which appeared on the Australian government’s ABC.



Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Hartcher, who helped put together the “Red Alert” series, was given a fawning, slobbering rim job of an interview from the ABC’s Beverley O’Connor where everything he said was received as gospel truth and not a single critical question was asked. When former prime minister Paul Keating’s scathing criticism of Hartcher’s war propaganda was raised, Hartcher was permitted to call Keating a CCP crony, completely unchallenged.

Hartcher claimed that Keating’s criticisms were “talking points that I think the Beijing government would be pretty satisfied with,” adding that “in recent years Keating has emerged as the leading defender of, and apologist for, the Chinese Communist Party in Australia.”

This type of rhetoric is familiar to anyone who’s been following US politics the last few years, where anyone who criticizes American foreign policy has been branded by empire loyalists as an apologist for the Kremlin. The fact that we are now seeing this mind virus take hold in mainstream Australian discourse with regard to China is both disgusting and disturbing.

The latest installment of the “Red Alert” series is titled “Australia has an urgent security problem. These confronting ideas can help solve it,” and it is the most incendiary of the bunch. The “experts” suggest rolling out mandatory national service to prepare Australians for war with China, as well as “basing US long-range missiles armed with nuclear weapons on Australian territory.”

As has been the case for the last two “Red Alert” installments, this one again speaks of the need to psychologically shift Australians into support for war preparations, saying that “Australia’s critical threshold change must be psychological,” and that it must take place “across society.” They don’t say it directly, but what they are advocating here is copious amounts of domestic war propaganda.

After receiving a deluge of angry social media comments decrying the article, The Sydney Morning Herald took the extraordinary step of banning replies. On Facebook, the “Australia has an urgent security problem” article now has a notification which reads, “The Sydney Morning Herald limits who can reply to this post.”

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None of the other articles on The Sydney Morning Herald’s Facebook page have this notice:

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On Twitter, The Sydney Morning Herald shut off comments on the article and hid the replies people had made to it. To find the hidden replies you have to know to click on a small button on the bottom-right corner of the tweet, but if you do you can read through the many negative comments the article was getting before the SMH Twitter account shut them down.

Here are some quotes from a few of them:

“What is the SMH doing? Stop with this alarmist rubbish. Thought you guys were better than that.”

“Oh for the love of God. Just stop already. We know exactly what the SMH is doing, who’s behind it & what a great distraction it is.”

“Australia’s biggest security problem is that our government and media have been captured by the US military industrial complex.”

“China has absolutely no interest in Australia. We are so minor and unimportant that trading with us is enough. If you losers could stop creaming yourselves at the idea of war you’d understand that, you weird, weird losers.”


In response to this latest wave of war propaganda, Declassified Australia published an article titled “Majority Oppose U.S. War On China,” which cites a 2022 poll by the Lowy Institute think tank saying that a 51 percent majority of those surveyed believe Australia should remain neutral in the event of a US military conflict with China over Taiwan.

It’s a point that’s worth making, but Declassified also notes that the 51 percent majority is down from 57 percent the last time the Lowy Institute took that poll in 2020. Why did six percent of the population change their minds about war with China in just two years? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that Australia has been slammed with propaganda about war with China during that time.

Propaganda works. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t pour so much energy into doing it. The empire churns out propaganda for the same reason advertising is on track to become a trillion-dollar industry in the next couple of years: because it is possible to manipulate people’s minds at mass scale using media.

They generate propaganda because it’s an effective way to manufacture consent for the agendas of the powerful, and they manufacture consent because they have to. If our rulers just started acting directly against the will of the people without first psychologically pulling the wool over our eyes using propaganda, they’d have a revolution on their hands in short order. Doing something huge like waging a war with China — with all the death, suffering, impoverishment, and risk of nuclear annihilation that goes with it — without the consent of the people would quickly lose public trust in all the ruling institutions which keep us marching to the beat of the imperial drum.



They don’t work so hard to manufacture our consent because it’s fun for them, they work so hard to manufacture our consent because they require our consent. So it’s important that we don’t give it to them. It’s important that we forcefully oppose the global conflict the US-centralized empire is pushing us all toward, and that we vocally decry the propaganda that’s being used to grease the wheels of that depraved agenda.

Ultimately the powerful have no answer to the problem that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that there’s really nothing they can do if we decide not to be ruled by them anymore. All they have is little work-arounds for that problem that they have to continually use day in and day out, in the same way we’ve designed work-arounds for the problem of gravity so that we can temporarily fly through the air.

But gravity always wins, and sooner or later the giant that these monsters have been keeping in a propaganda-induced coma is going to start stirring. We’re going to have to wake up sooner or later, and because of the stakes involved it is very important that we do everything we can to try and make sure that it is sooner.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/09 ... equire-it/

The immense treasure expended yearly on propaganda, advertising, public relations and the complete subversion of mainstream entertainment tells the story. For the Owners it is money well spent.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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