Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 23, 2022 2:10 pm

Escalation Without Consequences on the Op-Ed Page
GREGORY SHUPAK

Corporate media outlets are calling for the United States and its allies to react to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine by escalating the war. The opinion pages are awash with pleas to pump ever-more deadly weaponry into the conflict, to choke Russian civilians with sanctions, and even to institute a “no-fly zone.” That such approaches gamble with thousands, and possibly millions, of lives doesn’t shake the resolve of the press’s armchair generals.

No-fly zone: ‘necessary and overdue’
Enough! A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue
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The Daily Beast (3/18/22) dismisses fears of nuclear war in one paragraph: “To those who would argue that a no-fly-zone would mean the beginning of an apocalyptic World War III, I would counter argue that history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future.”
The Daily Beast (3/18/22) ran an opinion piece by Joshua D. Zimmerman contending that “A No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine Is Necessary and Overdue.” He said that

NATO should immediately announce a 72-hour ultimatum—using the threat of a no-fly zone over Ukraine as leverage—to demand an immediate cease-fire and the beginnings of a complete Russian withdrawal from Ukraine.

If Putin fails to meet these terms, then a NATO-led no-fly zone over Ukraine—at the express invitation of the Ukrainian government—will go into effect.

It’s hard to imagine three words doing more work than “go into effect” are here. A “no-fly zone” could only “go into effect” by NATO destroying Russia’s air capacities—by launching, that is, a direct NATO/Russia war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (3/7/22) conveyed the risks of such a move:

So long as NATO and Russian forces don’t begin fighting each other, the risk of nuclear escalation may be kept in check. But a close encounter between NATO and Russian warplanes (which would result if NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace) could become a flashpoint that leads to a direct and wider conflict.

Pesky details like nuclear war don’t bother Zimmerman, who claimed that “the only form of aid that today would halt Russia’s day-in, day-out slaughter of Ukrainian civilians is military intervention,” specifically a “no-fly zone.” He argued that “history has shown us that allowing aggressors to gain territory through force leads to much greater conflict in the future,” citing events from the 1930s such as Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Italy’s of Ethiopia and the Nazis’ conquests in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Perhaps Zimmerman selected examples from more than 80 years ago because more recent cases, in contexts much more comparable to the present one, demonstrate the danger of advocating a “no-fly zone” to save Ukrainians. Every “no-fly zone” established in the post–Cold War era has been a precursor to all- out war and the destruction of a country.

The United States implemented two “no-fly zones” over Iraq between 1991 and 2003, at which point the US and its partners moved on to the full-scale devastation of Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands in the process (Jacobin, 6/19/14). NATO created “no-fly zones” in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later over Kosovo, during the period in which NATO was dismantling Yugoslavia (Monthly Review, 10/1/07). In 2011, NATO imposed a “no-fly zone” in Libya, ostensibly to protect the population from Moammar Gadhafi (Jacobin, 9/2/13): The result was ethnic cleansing, the emergence of slave markets, mass civilian casualties (In These Times, 8/18/20) and more than a decade of war in the country.

Defending ‘US global leadership’
The Case for a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine
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Joe Lieberman (Wall Street Journal, 3/9/22): Some say a “no-fly zone” “might anger Mr. Putin and trigger World War III. But inaction based on fear usually causes more conflict than action based on confidence.” Positive thinking will allow the US to go to war with a nuclear power with nuclear war!
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Joe Lieberman (3/9/22) in which he too states “The Case for a No-Fly Zone in Ukraine.” The former senator and vice presidential candidate bemoaned that

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have said they couldn’t support a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that would be an offensive action, and NATO is a defensive alliance. But that makes no sense. The offensive actions are being carried out by invading Russian troops. The purpose of a no-fly zone would be defensive, protecting and defending the people of Ukraine from the Russians.

It’s Lieberman’s argument that “makes no sense”: NATO imposing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine would be an offensive action because it entails firing on Russian forces, and Russia has not fired at a NATO member.

Lieberman went on to say:

Sending American or other NATO planes into the air over Ukraine to keep Russian aircraft away would protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground, making it possible to defeat Mr. Putin’s brazen and brutal attempt to rebuild the Russian empire, undercut US global leadership and destroy the world order that we and our allies have built.

“Keep[ing] Russian aircraft away” is a strange way of saying “shooting down Russian aircraft,” which is what Lieberman is actually describing. And not only aircraft would be targeted: Even a prominent proponent of the “no-fly zone,” retired Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, acknowledged (NPR, 3/3/22; Forbes, 3/8/22):

Probably what would happen even before that is if there are defense systems in the enemy’s territory that can fire into the no-fly zone, then we normally take those systems out, which would mean bombing into enemy territory.

Or as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted behind closed doors while advocating for a “no-fly zone” in Syria (Intercept, 10/10/16; FAIR.org, 10/27/16): “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.”

In other words, Lieberman’s plan to “protect Ukrainian lives and freedom on the ground” is to initiate a shooting war in Ukrainian territory between the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear stockpiles (Independent, 2/28/22).

‘If they can shoot it, we can ship it’
Why Not Victory in Ukraine?
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The Wall Street Journal (3/16/22) praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s evocation of peace activist Martin Luther King before declaring that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial (3/16/22) said that “the US should be doing far more to arm the Ukrainians.” The editors approvingly quoted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse saying,

“If they can shoot it, we can ship it.” MiGs and Su-25s, S-200s and S-300s, drones.

An example are Switchblade drones that are portable and can destroy a target from a distance. The weapon is ideal for attacking tanks and some of the artillery units that are hitting cities and civilians. The latest US arms package reportedly includes 100 Switchblades. But the Pentagon should have delivered all of the Switchblades in the American arsenal to Ukraine at the start of the war, and then contracted to buy more.

The Journal’s editors were hardly alone in wanting to flood Ukraine with weapons. A Washington Post op-ed (3/16/22) by former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul asserted that “Ukrainians will ultimately defeat Vladimir Putin’s army,” and that the only question is how long it will take, though the basis for this claim appears to be little more than a priori reasoning and a crystal ball.

McFaul called on “the West” to “boost” military aid to Ukraine “to hasten the end of the war [in Ukraine’s favor] and thus save Ukrainian (and Russian) lives. More weapons…do just that.” McFaul wrote that “President Biden and his team cannot escalate US involvement in ways that might trigger nuclear war,” though escalation short of that threshold is apparently fine.
Why the West must boost military assistance to Ukraine
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Michael McFaul assures Washington Post readers (3/16/22), “If the risk of Russia’s escalation can be assessed to be below the nuclear threshold, then…the transfer of planes or air defense systems will not trigger World War III.”
Russia’s ruling class sees their country as having “a vital interest in preventing the expansion of hostile alliances on its borders” (Russia Matters, 3/14/19). Full Ukrainian membership in the alliance in question, NATO, may be far-fetched in the short-term, but last June, NATO insisted that Ukraine “will become” a member, and a year earlier, NATO recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunities partner.” Given that Russia sees “preventing” that as “a vital interest,” McFaul and the Journal editors are on shaky ground when they assume that the West giving Ukraine more weapons will cause Russia to give up, rather than countering the move with more firepower of its own.

Nor do the authors worry themselves with the peculiar habit US weapons have of finding their way to some of the nastiest factions in the warzones to which the US sends arms. ISIS benefited mightily from the US doling out weapons for use in Syria (Newsweek, 12/14/17), a practice that didn’t have particularly salutary effects for Syrians or people living beyond the country’s borders.

Arming proto–Al Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a central cause of such minor inconveniences as the 9/11 attacks and more than 40 years of war in Afghanistan (Jacobin, 9/11/21). The risks of a similar outcome in Ukraine are real, considering that the vicious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion is part of the Ukrainian military (Haaretz, 7/9/18), and that “far-right European militia leaders…have taken to the internet to raise funds, recruit fighters and plan travel to the front lines” (New York Times, 2/25/22).

Sanctions: ‘harsh’ but ‘appropriate’
‘I Want Peace.’ Zelensky’s Heroic Resistance Is an Example for the World.
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The New York Times (3/4/22) warned that ” it is the duty of all leaders to prepare their countries for…pain.”
A New York Times editorial (3/4/22) deemed the latest round of “harsh, immediate and wide-ranging sanctions” to be “appropriate,” because they “demonstrated that there are consequences for unprovoked wars of aggression.” (Note that over the last 30 years, the New York Times has never opposed and has often endorsed the United States’ numerous acts of military aggression—none of which can be described with a straight face as “provoked.”)

In this case, the “consequences”—”the ruble tanked, the Russian stock market plunged and Russians lined up at ATMs to withdraw money”—make life “harsh” for ordinary Russian civilians, irrespective of whether they support the war or the Putin government. (When polled, approximately one-fourth of Russia’s population expresses opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, roughly the same proportion of Americans that opposed the disastrous Iraq invasion—Meduza, 3/7/22; Gallup, 3/24/03).

Peter Rutland (The Conversation, 2/28/22), a scholar who focuses on Russia’s political economy, notes that “the falling ruble pushes up the price of imports, which make up over half the consumer basket,” including about 60% of the medicines Russians consume. According to Rutland, “The new sanctions will severely impact the living standard of ordinary Russians.”

Subjecting the Russian population to such policies is about as constructive a step toward a ceasefire in Ukraine as would be bombing St. Petersburg. Historically, sanctions have exacerbated rather than reduced international tensions; that sanctions preceded both Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last month, would suggest that the pattern is continuing (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

‘Punishing Russia’s economy’
Why Ukraine — and Russia’s aggression against it — matters to Americans
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The Washington Post (2/24/22) described the Ukraine invasion as “an aggressor’s bombs, missiles and tanks are wreaking horror and havoc on a weaker neighbor”—while the US’s similarly illegal invasions were “Middle Eastern wars that ended without clear victory.”
A Washington Post editorial (2/24/22) said that consequences of

unchecked Russian aggression…could be more damaging and more lasting than any turmoil stemming from the economic sanctions, limited troop deployments and other measures Mr. Biden has announced.

“Raising the costs to Mr. Putin,” the article said, “may still have an impact, but not unless those costs are truly punishing to Russia’s economy.”

In practical terms, “punishing…Russia’s economy” means penalizing virtually all Russians. Bloomberg (3/4/22) reports that Russia is now “on course for an economic collapse,” noting that JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s economists said that they “expect a 7% contraction in [Russia’s] gross domestic product this year, the same as Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Bloomberg Economics forecasts a fall of about 9%.”

Apart from being collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, “punishing” an entire country to the point that its economy faces possible “collapse” may indeed have an “impact.” However, that may be something other than a groundswell of support inside Russia for the sort of functional relationship with the United States that could help end the violence in Ukraine and prevent US/Russian brinksmanship—including the nuclear variety.

‘Putin’s troubles’
The war is not going Putin’s way. Congress must pass Ukraine aid swiftly.
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The Washington Post (2/27/22) called the remilitarization of Germany “the sound of a mature democracy, Europe’s richest and largest, dealing a strategic defeat” to Russia.
A Washington Post editorial (2/27/22) three days later advocated sanctions in a roundabout fashion, noting that polls suggest Americans support such moves:

Lawmakers should consider these data from a new Washington Post/ABC News poll: 67% percent of American adults favor sanctions against Russia. More than half of adults said they would support sanctions even if it meant higher energy prices. Between the resistance of the Ukrainians and the unity of the West, Mr. Putin appears baffled. Congress should add to his troubles.

Yet sanctions do not merely “add to [Putin’s] troubles”: They are acts of war. The paper is seeking an escalation in the US/Russia conflict from which Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inextricable (FAIR.org, 1/15/22; Canadian Dimension, 3/18/22).

Corporate media may not be saying that America should launch a third world war, but the courses these outlets are recommending are geared toward prolonging the war in Ukraine, intensifying the violence and risking its expansion, rather toward achieving a negotiated end to the war as quickly as possible.

https://fair.org/home/escalation-withou ... p-ed-page/
"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 24, 2022 2:19 pm

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Fake News, Fake History, Fake Law
March 23, 2022
By Alfred De Zayas – Mar 21, 2022

“Fake news” is a widespread phenomenon – not only in wartime, but also in daily political and economic relations. Fake news are not only disseminated by governments and its proxies, but also practiced by the private sector, by media conglomerates, by individuals in their correspondence, gossip, social media and through the internet.

Fake news is as prevalent in Europe as it is in the United States, in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Patently false narratives, false flag operations and bogus incidents are concocted by governments in order to justify their policies, a compliant corporate media acting as echo chambers of the propaganda issued by governments. Purportedly independent journalists (with their own agendas) have no hesitation to print evidence-free allegations, referring to anonymous officials or witnesses, supported by “secret intelligence”. Thus emerges “fragmented truth”, and no one really knows what truth is, everyone clings to his own views, refusing to consider alternative versions of the facts. When it comes to access to reliable information, freedom of opinion and expression, we live in an increasingly polarized, intolerant, intransigent world.

Only reluctantly we must acknowledge that “fake news” have always been around, the difference being that in the past only governments were purveyors of fake news, only governments could successfully manipulate public opinion, whereas today anybody with access to the internet can also weigh in. From experience we also know that all media – CNN, BBC, DW, NYTimes, Washington Post, The Times, The Economist, Le Monde, Le Figaro, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, El Pais, El Mundo, RT, Sputnik, CGTN, Asia Times, Telesur – all slant the news in a particular way. They cite their favourite spin doctors and distort the facts, lying here and there, suppressing inconvenient facts and opinions, or shamelessly applying double-standards.

The perception of contemporary events eventually generates “fake history”, which necessarily builds on the steady flow of both verifiable information and fake news. As an aspiring historian taking courses in the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (at the same time as I was getting my law degree), as a doctoral candidate in history at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Göttingen in Germany, I learned to question historical narratives, look at the sources, insist on seven C’s of history writing; chronology, context, coherence, comprehensiveness, causality,comparison and cui bono (who stands to gain from an event and from a particular interpretation). I was taught never to rely on a single source, but proactively to look for alternative views, see whether the standard narrative can be challenged, whether the subsequent publication of previously classified documents, whether the memoirs of movers and shakers, politicians and diplomats suggest the necessity of adjusting in the mainstream narrative.

My research activities for my publications on the Spanish Civil War and on the Second World War and its aftermath convinced me that history textbooks were not all that reliable, that some of them were essentially propagating oversimplifications that ignored crucial facts, that long debunked canards had found their way into the mainstream narrative, sometimes resulting in a caricature of events. My research in public and private archives in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, my ability to read the original documents in English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Russian opened my horizons far beyond the accepted narratives. On the other hand, I realized that archives could be incomplete, that inconvenient documents could have been destroyed, that pertinent information is still classified. Personal interviews with key players like George F. Kennan, Robert Murphy, James Riddleberger, Lord Strang, Lord Paget, Lord Weidenfeld, Lord Thomas, Sir Geoffrey Harrison, Sir Denis Allen, Telford Taylor, Benjamin Ferencz, Howard Levie, Albert Speer, Karl Dönitz, Otto von Habsburg, Kurt Waldheim, added missing links and nuances. I was able to connect the dots.

I also realized that the optimistic expectation that as time passes and emotions abate the historical narrative will become more objective is a sorry illusion. Frequently the very opposite happens, because as the persons in the know disappear, as witnesses die and no one is left to dispute the politically useful narrative, pseudo-history is cemented and emerges as the socially accepted narrative. Extrapolating from my experience researching 20th century historical events, I am convinced that our knowledge of Greek and Roman times, our perception of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Napoleonic ear, must be woefully incomplete. I also realize that it will be very difficult to change the established narratives – absent some extraordinary discovery of previously unknown manuscripts of diplomatic or commercial correspondence, papyrus or cuneiform tablets.

What amazes me is that no one seems to be talking about “fake law”? Indeed, politicians and journalists frequently “invent” law as they go along, contending that what some lobby or interest group invokes as law actually has legal force, as if law and legal obligations could spontaneously arise, without the drafting, negotiation and adoption process of all legislation, treaties, conventions, or without the ratification by Parliaments.

We must beware of the loose use of legal terms, which undermines the authority and credibility of the law. Not every military encounter entails “aggression”, not every massacre constitutes “genocide”, not every form of sexual harassment can be considered “rape”. Nor is every jailed politician a “political prisoner”, nor every migrant a “refugee”. And yet, much hyperbole and political agitation play out on this pseudo-legal arena, much political blackmail is practiced on the basis of fake “law”, much propaganda is actually believed by average citizens. Mundus vult decepi (the world wants to be deceived).

Politicians who want to impose sanctions insist that they are legal, without, however, elucidating the legal basis. In classical international law unilateral coercive measures are not legal. The only legal sanctions are those imposed by the UN Security Council under article VII of the Charter. All other unilateral coercive measures actually constitute an illegal “use of force”, prohibited in article 2(4) of the Charter, and contrary to article 2(3), which requires negotiations in good faith.

Moreover, the extra-territorial application of national law (e.g. the Helms-Burton Act) violates numerous principles of the United Nations, including the sovereign equality of states, the self-determination of peoples, freedom of commerce and freedom of navigation. Every day politicians and the media invent their own law – but it is bogus law. Alas, the media simply disseminates the “fake law” as a form of “fake news” – and people believe it.

Some politicians pretend that there is a human right to migration, but fail to give any treaty or doctrinal source. Of course every sovereign state can generously open its border and welcome both economic migrants and refugees, but this opening of frontiers is nowhere required by international law. In fact, the very ontology of a sovereign state since the Peace of Westphalia is that the state controls its frontiers and determines who can and cannot enter its territory. This is customary international law recognized in every textbook.

There is, of course, the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and members of their Families, but this Convention applies only to migrant workers who have already entered the territory and have their papers in order. Moreover, the Convention does not establish a right of migration, it only specifies the rights of migrant workers living within the State’s jurisdiction. It should also be noted that only 56 countries have ratified the MWC – not the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain etc.

All too often we are confronted by a combination of fake news, fake history and fake law, a very toxic cocktail for any democracy. Alas, fake law has become a favourite weapon of demagogues and phoney “experts” and “diplomats” who gleefully engage in what may be termed “fake diplomacy”, as the goal is not to reach a reasonable negotiated settlement, but rather to score points on the gladiator arena of power-politics, with the dutiful collusion of a sold-out and capricious media.

The unsuccessful encounters between Putin and Biden, between Lavrov and Blinken belong in this category of “fake diplomacy”. Indeed, unless we do away with fake news, fake history and fake law, it will be very difficult to advance with true diplomacy in the sense of George F. Kennan. Thus continues the game of sabre-rattling and sanctions that have brought the world to a situation of armed conflict, which could even degenerate into World War III. In the process many fortunes are being made, since nothing is more lucrative than the arms business, and the military-industrial-financial complex has a economic interest in stoking tensions and war.

Is there a solution to “fake news”? Demagogues would establish an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”, others would criminalize “fake news” (but only inconvenient “fake news”), others would pretend to filter facts and opinion using self-made tools to determine what is true and what isn’t.

No one needs this kind of Inquisition and censorship, because neither governments nor the private sector can be gatekeepers of the truth. The only solution is ensuring access to pluralistic information and open debate. Society must demand greater transparency at all levels and proactively seek the truth by consulting multiple sources and making a new synthesis, which will not be “revealed truth” or “immutable truth”, but a constantly evolving truth that incorporates the complexity and nuances of reality on the ground.

All of the above raises the question whether we are not already living under a fake democracy? What kind of correlation is there between the will and needs of the people and the laws and regulations that govern them? Is there not a great disconnect between governments and the people? Are there any democratic governments where the people actually can fully take part in the conduct of public affairs as envisaged in article 25 of the International covenant on Civil and Political Rights? Where is the power of initiative and the right to hold referendums recognized? Surely the meaning of democracy must encompass more than the ritual act of going to the polls once every two or four years. Surely the democratic process must allow real choices, not just pro-forma voting for one of two candidates. In my reports to the General Assembly and Human Rights Council I insisted that those individuals who are elected do not really govern, while those who govern are not elected. I deplored the fact that “representative democracy” can only be called democratic if the Parliamentarians represent the electorate, if they proactively inform the electorate and proactively consult with them. As an American I have noted that US elections do not permit real choices, and that we can only exercise the fake right to vote for A or B, knowing that both A and B are committed to the military-industrial complex, that both support Wall Street over Main Street, that both are for capitalism with no frills, and in foreign affairs both are hawks, both are interventionists, both prefer to engage in military interventions than to negotiate in good faith. This ontological disconnect made me conclude that the two-party system we know in the United States is only twice as democratic as the one-party system that rules China. Democracy means rule by and for the people. Alas, we do not enjoy democracy and must content ourselves with the window-dressing, with the pro-forma rhetoric, with the trappings of democracy.

It is time for the American people to demonstrate the courage to demand an end to fake news, fake history, fake law, fake diplomacy and fake democracy. But to achieve that we must first win the information war and defeat those who systematically brainwash the public. It will take time to reform the system, but this is a task we cannot avoid. We owe it to future generations.

https://orinocotribune.com/fake-news-fa ... -fake-law/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 25, 2022 1:58 pm

Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts
Dan Cohen reveals the network of foreign strategists, Washington DC lobbyists, and intelligence-linked media outlets behind Ukraine’s public relations blitz.

by Dan Cohen

March 22nd, 2022



WASHINGTON DC — Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath. To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.

The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.

Behind Ukraine’s public relations effort is an army of foreign political strategists, Washington DC lobbyists, and a network of intelligence-linked media outlets.

Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”

Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare.

According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm.

“From the first hour of war, we decided to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them distribute the official sources to show the truth,” the nameless figure told PR Week. “This is a hybrid war: the mix of bloodily struggling fight with a huge disinformation and fake campaign lead by Russia [sic].”

According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.

The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingraham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.

“We’ve been privileged to help coordinate efforts to support the Ukrainian Government in the last few days, “ Ingham told PRovoke Media. “Agencies have offered up entire teams to support Kyiv in the communications war. Our support for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is unwavering and will continue for as long as needed.”

With an anonymous Ukrainian figure joining two of the top public relations figures in the Kiev government’s propaganda blitz, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs distributed a dossier folder (archived) with materials instructing public relations agencies on “key messages,” approved language, content for debunked propaganda constructs, far-right and Neo-Nazi propaganda.

The folder is run by Yaroslav Turbil, described on his LinkedIn page as “Head of Ukraine.ua — Ukraine’s digital ecosystem for global communications. Strategic Communications & Country Brand Promotion.” Turbil has worked at multiple “civil society” organizations closely linked to the U.S. government and interned at Internews, a U.S. intelligence-linked organization that operates under the guise of promoting press freedom.

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Among the propaganda constructs distributed in the dossier, is a video of the Snake Island incident, which was quickly proven false, in which Ukrainian border guards stationed on a small island were reported to have been killed after they told an approaching Russian warship that had urged them to surrender to “Go f*** yourself.” President Zelensky held a press conference announcing he would award the men the Hero of Ukraine medal as mainstream media spread the story widely. However, the supposedly-dead soldiers quickly turned up alive and well, proving their heroic stand to be a farce.

Despite the story being proven as fake, the dossier contains a propaganda video promoting it.

Another folder in the dossier is run by Ukrainian MFA graphic artist Dasha Podoltseva and contains hundreds of propaganda graphics submitted by artists in Europe and the United States.

Some feature generic “no war” messages, while dozens of other images celebrate “The Ghost of Kiev” – a heroic Ukrainian pilot who turns out to be non-existent – and the phony “Snake Island 13” incident.

Many use xenophobic and racist language, and some are explicit in their praise of prominent Ukrainian Neo-Nazis, including C14 leader Yevhen Karas, the Right Sector fascist paramilitary, and the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion. Multiple images call for “Banderite smoothies” – a reference to Molotov cocktails named for the late OUN-B commander Stephan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany in the mass murder of Jews and ethnic Poles during World War II. Another image depicts a book titled the: ”Encyclopedia of Incurable Diseases,” listing Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, and Eritrea.


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“Thank You Ukrainian Army” with an Azov Battalion Wolfsengel patch emblazoned on the sleeve”

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“The Encyclopedia of Incurable Disease: Russia, Belorussia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea”


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“Bandera Smoothie”

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Flag of Neo-Nazi paramilitary Right Sector. Red represents “blood” and black represents “soil”

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Ukraine or Valhalla – a reference to the where heroes of Norse mythological go after death, a theme commonly appropriated by neo-Nazis

Foreign extremists flock to Ukraine

The dossier also contains a link to a Ministry of Foreign Affairs page called “Fight for Ukraine,” which provides instructions for foreigners who wish to join Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi-infested armed forces – termed the “International Defense Legion of Ukraine.”

Following Zelensky’s call for foreign fighters to form a brigade, fighters from all over the world, including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and more have traveled to face Russian forces. Others with no combat training or experience have arrived for “war tourism” – what one British soldier called “bullet-catchers.”

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Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

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Official Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recruitment graphics from the dossier

While the Ukrainian government says tens of thousands have answered their call, some commentators expressed doubt at those figures, calling it a “PR exercise.”

However, the foreigners who have traveled to Ukraine have encountered a much more severe reality than they anticipated.

Russia’s air force bombed military installations adjacent to where the foreign fighters were sleeping. Having fled to neighboring Poland, a Spanish fighter described the bombing as a “message” that could have killed thousands.

Similarly, an American fighter who hid in an ambulance to escape the frontlines warned that Ukrainian authorities were killing foreigners who decided not to fight, calling it a “trap.”


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Correct wording

One document inside the dossier delineates acceptable language on the conflict with Russia as determined by the Ukrainian government.


“Such Russian clichés like ‘referendum in Crimea’ or ‘will of the people of Crimea’ are absolutely unacceptable,” the document states, in reference to the 2014 overwhelmingly successful referendum to separate from Ukraine.

The document deems unacceptable the terms “Civil war in Donbass,” “Internal conflict,” “Conflict in Ukraine” and “Ukrainian crisis” to describe the Ukrainian military’s war with the breakaway republics of the Donbass region. This, despite the fact that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 14,200 people, including 3,404 civilians, have been killed in internal fighting in Ukraine since 2014.

In place of these phrases, the document calls for the use of the terms “Armed aggression by the Russian Federation in Donbass, international armed conflict, Russian war against Ukraine, Russian-Ukrainian conflict armed conflict.”


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Key Messages

Another document titled “Key Messages” contains specific propaganda claims that were widely disseminated in mainstream western media, but which have since been discredited. One section claims the “entire Europe was put on the brink of nuclear disaster, when the Russian troops began shelling the largest in Europe Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”


However, International Atomic Energy Agency’s director-general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, said that the building hit by a Russian “projectile” at the Zaporizhzhia plant was “not part of the reactor” but instead a training center. Russian troops also left Ukrainian workers to continue operating the plant.

Another section thanks Turkey for the decision “to block the access of Russian warships to the Black Sea.”

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits to all military vessels, preventing both NATO and Russian vessels from accessing the Black Sea.

Among the document’s key messages is a statement of gratitude to the “Anti-war demonstrations held by citizens of many nations throughout the world demonstrate strong support to Ukraine in defending against Russia.”

This refers to large pro-Ukraine demonstrations in Europe which have featured calls for the U.S. and NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine and shoot down Russian military aircraft, potentially transforming the conflict into a world war between nuclear-armed powers.


“Despite Russia’s propaganda, there is no discrimination based on the race or nationality, including when it comes to the crossing of the state border by foreign citizens,” claims the Ukrainian document.

However, numerous videos and reports have documented Ukrainian authorities preventing Africans from fleeing the fighting. Even the New York Times – hardly a bastion of Kremlin propaganda – published a report documenting these racist practices.

One message says that “On 16 March, the Russian forces dropped a bomb on a drama theatre where up to 1300 civilians were being sheltered. The number of casualties is still unknown.”

However, as Max Blumenthal reported the explosion appears to be the result of a false flag operation designed by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and aimed at triggering a NATO intervention.

NATO-backed troll farms

Another anonymously-penned investigation shows how Ukrainian public relations firms have used targeted advertisements to astroturf Russian internet and social media networks with messaging calling to economically isolate Moscow and “stop the war.” This effort is led by Bezlepkin Evgeny Vitalievich, who uses the alias Evgeny Korolev, along with Pavel Antonov of the Targetorium organization. From behind his Korolev pseudonym, the Ukrainian information warrior composed a post on his Facebook page (now private) boasting that his firm’s Facebook ads achieved 30 million hits in three days.

At the same time, Facebook has blocked Russian state-owned media outlets from running ads and monetizing content. Several fake accounts for media outlets like Russia 24 have sprung up, burying the authentic account under a series of impostors. Facebook has also marked statements from Russian officials, including the Ministry of Defense, as “false.”

This campaign has reportedly been carried out upon recommendation from StopFake, a self-described “fact checking” outlet that is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, Atlantic Council, Czech and UK foreign ministries, and the International Renaissance Foundation, which is funded by billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent Neo-Nazis. The journalist who co-authored the exposé received death threats and ultimately fled Ukraine.

Those revelations have apparently not prevented Facebook from relying on the organization for censorship guidance.

Meanwhile, Russian hackers located a public Google document (since made private, uploaded here) detailing the propaganda operation, which has been distributed in Telegram channels of “creative farms.”

“Here you can find links to Ukrainian media that need promotion, bot accounts with logins and passwords from which anti-war messages and messages with fakes about the Ministry of Defense were sent to users, theses and specific instructions on which posts and which audiences to embroider,” the investigation reads.

Another campaign is run by Nataliya Popovych, the founder of the public relations agency, One Philosophy, in Kiev. Popovych’s LinkedIn profile shows she has worked with the U.S. State Department and advised former President Petro Poroshenko. She is also co-founder and board member of Ukraine Crisis Media Center, a propaganda arm funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Embassy, and NATO, among many others.

A Campaign Asia article profiles several public relations firms involved in the effort. Among them is Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman PR. Edelman is also a member of the Atlantic Council’s Board of Directors and the World Economic Forum.

“Geopolitics has become the new test for trust. We saw this with the allegations of human rights abuses in Xinjiang and the war between Ukraine and Russia has only reinforced it,” he said, linking the U.S. propaganda campaign surrounding China’s deradicalization campaign for Uyghur Muslims.



PR approved media outlets

An article in PRWeek profiles several figures partaking in what they describe as a “PR army” that is “fighting on the informational frontline” against Russia’s “barbaric genocide of Ukrainians.”

“Propaganda is the same as real lethal weapons,” declares Marta Dzhumaha, PR manager at healthcare company BetterMe.

Julia Petryk, head of public relations at MacPaw, offers a list of approved media outlets, authored by her colleague Tetiana Bronistka, a former employee of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office. The list includes Russian and English language sources, as well as Telegram channels. However, these “verified sources that objectively cover what is happening in Ukraine” are anything but independent. Most of them are tied to the U.S. and European governments and billionaire foundations.

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She also lists several Russian-language websites:

Novaya Gazeta – Tied to and reportedly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy
Meduza – Funded by the government of Latvia, OAK Foundation, Open Society Foundation ​​oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorovsky, and Sweden
Dozhd – SREDA foundation, European Commission
Holod Media – Offshoot of Meduza – praised in PBS and CNN as “independent media”
Proposed that Leningrad should have been surrendered to the Nazis in World War 2 and has complained that they are called a “fifth column” for being funded by western powers
BBC Russia – British government media
Current Time TV – Created by CIA-founded propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in collaboration with Voice of America
Censor – funded by, editor in chief Yuri Butusov, former advisor to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine
200RF – A Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website that claims to publish publishes photos and documents of the Russian soldiers captured and killed in action

Among the Telegram channels listed are:

Radio Svoboda – CIA-founded propaganda organ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
Espresso TV, largely owned by the wife of former Ukrainian member of parliament Mykola Knyazhytsky
Censor.net, formerly the largest media site in Ukraine, whose motto is “To bring down Russia”, and whose owner operates a “parade of international trolls.”


Intelligence operations

While the public relations firms distribute content, CIA cutouts and billionaire foundations run the media outlets they derive it from. At the core of this operation is a project called the Russian Language News Exchange that was the product of a network of opposition media outlets founded in 2016 that operate in post-Soviet countries, as revealed by an investigation by the Russian media agency, RIA FAN.

In July 2021, a group of journalists flew to Warsaw for media training after being exempted from coronavirus-related restrictions and quarantine orders by Poland’s top medical authorities.

Among the six journalists were Andrey Lipsky, deputy editor-in-chief of Novaya Gazeta, and Yuliia Fediv, CEO of Hromadske TV media, one of the most-watched networks in Ukraine.

Hromadske’s financial reports show it is funded by numerous governments and foundations, including the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the European Endowment for Democracy, and Free Press Unlimited. Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidary was also involved in creating the outlet.

Hromadske recently hosted a commentator demanding genocide of ethnic Russians in the Donbass, saying it is populated with 1.5 “superfluous” people that “must be exterminated.”



The training, held behind closed doors from July 19 to July 21, was titled “Media Network 2021+” and closely tied to Mediaset, also known as the Russian Language News Exchange, a network founded in 2015. Russian Language News Exchange’s website is sparse, with little available information on its activities – apparently made private since the publication of RIA FAN’s investigation.

While it claims to be independent, Russian Language News Exchange is a project of Free Press Unlimited, funded by the Dutch government and the European Commission.

Today, it includes 14 media outlets that act as “nodes,” cross-publishing each other’s articles in various countries.

The website’s introductory video is hosted by Maxim Eristavi, a former Radio Free Europe reporter and founder of Hromadske. Today, he heads the Millennium Leadership Program at the NATO and arms industry-backed think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Since its inception, Mediaset has coordinated between outlets in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. In March 2021, Mediaset expanded with the Colab Medios Project, created through the Free Press Unlimited Viable Media for Empowered Societies (VIMES) program. This program created training for journalists and saw articles from the El Salvadoran outlet El Faro published in Euroradio (Belarus), Coda (Georgia), and Ziarul de Garda (Moldova).

On March 4, several days after Russia launched its military offensive, a new project called the Media Lifeline Ukraine was created.

The next day, Free Press Unlimited held an emergency conference for Ukraine featuring Hromadske co-founders Maxim Eristavi and Nataliya Gumenyuk. The meeting called to raise 2 million euros for the project. “Only with ongoing external support, will local media entities be able to continue to do their work,” its introductory page asks.

Days later, Free Press Unlimited announced a partnership to support a new joint project of Reporters Without Borders and its Ukrainian partner, the Institute for Mass Information, called The Lviv Press Freedom Center. The Institute for Mass Information is headed by USAID communications officer Oksana Romaniuk and funded by USAID and the UK government.



Washington DC lobbyists wag the dog

While public relations firms and intelligence-linked propaganda operations target the public, Washington DC lobbyists are agitating in Congress to extend the war in Ukraine

Daniel Vajdich, a registered foreign agent and lobbyist for the Ukrainian Federation of Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry, the largest in Ukraine, is working on behalf of Volodymyr Zelensky to lobby members of Congress to approve more weapons shipments to Ukraine. Now the head of Yorktown Solutions, he previously advised Ted Cruz and Scott Walker’s campaigns and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“Stingers, Javelins, and let’s figure out the fighter aircraft issue,” he told Politico, claiming Russia is attempting to carry out a “genocide” and “depopulate certain areas of Ukraine.”

Vajdich also wrote Zelenskyy’s March 16 speech to U.S. Congress, in which he quoted Martin Luther King Jr. ‘s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to call for a no-fly zone over Ukraine.

Ukrainian Permanent Representative at the United Nations Sergiy Kyslytsya’s February 23 speech to the United Nations General Assembly was written by DC lobbying firm SKDKnickerbocker Managing Director Stephen Krupin, a former senior speechwriter to President Barack Obama who worked extensively on Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Most prominent among the registered lobbyists promoting Ukrainian government and business interests is Andrew Mac, who also contributed to writing Zeleneksyy’s speech to Congress. Mac registered as a lobbyist for Zelensky in 2019 and runs the Washington DC office of Ukrainian law firm Asters Law.

The lobbying firm Your Global Strategy, founded by Shai Franklin, who has been affiliated with numerous Zionist organizations including the World Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League, is also using its influence with local officials in the U.S. Franklin has set up meetings between Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov and U.S. mayors, including Eric Adams in New York City, Michelle Wu in Boston and Lori Lightfoot in Chicago. He is also attempting to set up a meeting between U.S. officials and the mayors of Odessa and Kiev. A media outlet owned by the mayor of Kiev’s wife recently featured a presenter calling for genocide against Russians, beginning with children.

Franklin said he’s working with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration to help set up virtual meetings between mayors of Odessa and Kiev and U.S. counterparts.

Maryland-based lawyer Lukas Jan Kaczmarek is also working on behalf of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense to increase U.S. weapons shipments, specifically seeking to arrange shipments of guns from Kel-Tec CNC Industries based in Cocoa, Florida, to the city of Odessa, Ukraine.

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul described the network of public relations professionals and lobbyists surrounding Zelenskyy. “These are people around Mr. Zelenskyy who are like the intermediaries and interlocutors. They’ve been interacting with the American elites and American media for a long time,” he said.

McFaul and John E. Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, act as informal advisors to Zelenskyy. McFaul told Politico that he speaks to Ukrainian government officials “probably everyday,” and “has helped them make connections with NBC or MSNBC producers.”

McFaul recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that “Hitler did not kill German-speaking people, facing accusations of Holocaust denial.

Zelenskyy also held a “strategic video call” with McFaul before he spoke to House democrats.

With a powerful Russian military fighting alongside DPR and LPR forces, the Ukrainian military’s defeat seems to be imminent unless the United States and NATO directly confront Russian forces, a scenario President Biden has already ruled out. Lobbyists nevertheless persist in their campaign to portray the Ukrainian military as underdogs scoring blow after blow against Russian hordes. In doing so, they help extend the war and continue the carnage.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/ukraine-p ... ts/280012/

Many more images at link.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sun Mar 27, 2022 10:54 pm

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BBC correspondent-fixer shaping Ukraine war coverage is PR operative involved in “war-messaging tool”
MAX BLUMENTHAL·MARCH 25, 2022

BBC reports on the suspicious destruction of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol were co-authored by a Ukrainian PR agent tied to a firm at the forefront of her country’s information warfare efforts.

Before serving as a fixer and reporter for the BBC in Ukraine, Orysia Khimiak handled PR for a start-up called Reface which created what the Washington Post called a “reality distorting app” now serving as “a kind of Ukrainian war-messaging tool.”

According to her Linkedin profile, Khimiak was the director of PR for Reface until October 2021. While working that job, Khimiak says she built “long-term relationships with editors and media representatives.” She has also overseen a PR course for the Kiev-based Projector Institute, whose website currently greets visitors with the slogan, “Glory to Ukraine. We Will Win.”

With her wealth of media contacts, Khimiak now plays an instrumental role in shaping BBC’s coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian war. She has even shared a byline with the network’s Lviv-based correspondent, Hugo Bachega, co-authoring reports focused on demonstrating Russian culpability for the bombing of the Mariupol dramatic theater.

Khimiak broadcasts her political bias in her Twitter bio, stating that she is “a fixer in Lviv for journalists for reporters who show honest image of Russian war against Ukraine. Ukraine will resist.”

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Khimiak’s Twitter background references the “Snake Island” standoff which was widely reported by mainstream Western media outlets and heralded as a testament to Ukrainian military bravery. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, 13 Ukrainian border guards “died heroically” defending an island base against they Russian Navy. “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!” were the soldiers’ final words, or so the story went.

The Ukrainian guards ultimately turned up alive as Russian captives. The entire story of courage under fire, including the Snake Island defenders’ famous last words, was a myth – one of so many stories fabricated or heavily distorted by pro-Ukraine elements that they have become impossible to count.

On the Twitter page of the PR agent-turned-BBC correspondent Khimiak, the phony Snake Island stand-off is still treated as a real historical event. On her Twitter timeline, meanwhile, Khimiak takes credit for the BBC’s reports on the destruction of the Mariupol dramatic theater. She and her co-author, Bachega, have yet to respond to a request for comment from The Grayzone.

The incident at the Mariupol theater represents one of the most suspicious events of the war, with both the BBC and CNN citing a claim by one local Ukrainian official claiming hundreds were killed inside the building, but producing no evidence to verify it.

CNN, BBC rely on single official pro-Azov source for claim of hundreds dead
Russian forces have caused widespread destruction across Mariupol, where they have been engaged in intense street-by-street fighting with Ukrainian forces led by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

However, as this reporter detailed, the Mariupol theater was controlled by retreating Azov militants who were desperately appealing for military intervention by NATO. Several evacuees have claimed Azov detonated the theater to create the impression of a Russian attack that might draw the West into the war. Meanwhile, video of the alleged Russian attack on the theater has yet to materialize, and images of the supposed rescue of survivors or mass deaths at the scene remain unavailable.

On March 25, nine days after the incident, CNN broadcast what it said was the first footage of the attack on the theater. The footage (seen below) was only 20 seconds long and showed a small group of civilians slowly ambling down a staircase to the ground floor of a building. A narrator can be heard behind the camera repeatedly referring to an airstrike but claiming that those on the first floor had survived.


The video appeared to have been shot some time after the attack, as none of the smoldering present in video taken in the aftermath of the explosion could be seen. That video, seen below and taken on March 16, shows a smoking building with no rescuers or any people on site.


CNN has also claimed that 300 civilians were killed inside the theater. The BBC also echoed the official Ukrainian claim of 300 dead, but acknowledged, “Communication with Mariupol remains difficult so it is hard to independently verify information.”

Both networks relied on just a single source for the dramatic allegation: Petr Andryushchenko, an advisor to the mayor of Mariupol who recently saluted the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion as courageous “defenders” of his city.

The official’s evidence? According to the BBC, “officials were able to check the death toll because they had a record of who was in the theatre before the missile strike and had spoken to survivors.”

Western media did not see fit to mention that Andryushchenko was likely far from Mariupol, as he recently acknowledged “that we are forced to move in order to preserve our intelligence network.” His boss, Mayor Vadim Boychenko, reportedly fled the city several days ago.

Curiously, partisan Ukrainian reporters claimed a day after the attack that everyone sheltering inside the theater’s basement had miraculously survived.


Illia Ponomarenko, correspondent for the US and EU-sponsored Kyiv Independent, cited official sources a day after the theater incident claiming all had survived

Also on March 17, Ukrainian government ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova stated on Telegram: “The (theatre) building withstood the impact of a high-powered air bomb and protected the lives of people hiding in the bomb shelter.”

Four days before the incident, Mariupol locals informed Russian media that the theater was to be the site of a false flag operation aimed at generating Western outrage and triggering NATO intervention.

One day after the incident took place, civilians evacuated from Mariupol testified to Donbas-based media that Azov fighters blew the theater up as they retreated. They went on to detail how Azov used them as human shields throughout the fighting, even sniping at them as they tried to escape.


Among the most curious aspects of the incident of the theater was the disappearance of all vehicles from the parking lot in front of the structure hours before the explosion occurred. It seems that though they had been removed in order to avoid being damaged by the expected blast.

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Photos and Maxar satellite images of the theater (above) on March 15 show vehicles parked immediately next to the building

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Photos and Maxar satellite images taken in the immediate aftermath of the explosion at the theater show no vehicles, as though they had been removed in expectation of the blast

Ukrainian PR agent-turned-BBC fixer hand picks local sources

Ignoring the accounts of evacuees from Mariupol who said Azov militants had destroyed the theater before retreating, the BBC’s correspondent, Bechaga, and his fixer, Khimiak, initially turned to official Ukrainian sources and a resident who was not present at the theater on the day of the supposed attack.

On March 17, the day after the theater incident, Bechaga and Khimiak reported that “according to Ukrainian authorities, [the theater] was bombed by Russia…” Their only local source said she left the theater one day before the building was destroyed – when most, if not all those on the grounds appeared to leave. “We knew we had to run away because something terrible would happen soon,” she told the BBC.

The BBC reporter and PR agent-turned-fixer co-authored a March 22 follow-up article quoting two local witnesses who said they were near the theater when a massive blast occurred. Both delivered cinematic accounts which open source intelligence analyst Michael Kobs called into question.


The male witness said he “saw plenty of people bleeding.” However, in a time when nearly every person carries a smartphone, video of the harrowing scene he described has yet to surface.

Finally, the BBC turned to McKenzie Intelligence, a private contractor founded by a former UK military intelligence officer, to hypothesize that a Russian 500-pound laser guided missile was used to destroy the theater. But as the open source analyst Kobs pointed out, “the center of destruction sits right in the middle of the stage, so two dumb bombs can’t possibly be to blame.”

While the BBC seems intent on legitimizing the official Ukrainian narrative of the theater incident, other mainstream outlets have quietly moved on. “Even now, the fates of most of those people [inside the theater] remain unknown,” the NY Times noted in passing on March 21.

BBC fixer/correspondent worked for firm behind top “Ukrainian-war messaging tool”
The BBC’s choice of an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations agent to guide its coverage of the war highlights the network’s absolute alignment with NATO’s objectives.

Before her gig with the British state broadcaster, Khimiak handled public relations for a Kiev-based start-up that created an AI app enabling users to superimpose their faces on the bodies of famous people. Called Reface, the app has become “a kind of Ukrainian-war messaging tool” disseminating anti-Russian push notifications to millions of users, the Washington Post reported.

According to the Post, “reality-distorting apps like Reface are a way for users to absorb messages they might otherwise tune out. People have their guards up with political news on those platforms… But they lower them for an immersive experience like face-swapping.”

Reface now says it is engaged in a “viral battle against #russianterrorists.”


As part of its efforts against Russia, Reface said it has blocked Russian users from accessing the app. Further, “everyone who opens the app sees a message to support Ukraine” along with a banner “with information about the real losses of the Russian army.” A watermark with the Ukrainian flag and the hashtag #StandWithUkraine is layered over each video that appears on the app.

Reface says its employees have joined “the territorial defense units and volunteers, and several teams have also joined the cyber troops to fight Russian propaganda.”

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All Reface videos contain a watermark urging users to support Ukraine’s war effort

For her part, the former Reface PR director Khimiak-turned-BBC correspondent/fixer has not been reticent about Ukraine’s Russian adversaries. “I just can’t accept opinion that not all Russians are bad. All I feel is pain and hate, because their silence is a consequence of this war,” she declared on Twitter in reaction to a video depicting rescuers trying to save a young girl from rubble.



Though BBC proclaims in its own statement of values, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest,” its hiring of a Ukrainian public relations specialist who has confessed to hatred of all Russians to arrange its coverage of the war in the country is hardly surprising.

As The Grayzone reported in February 2021, the British broadcaster’s non-profit arm, BBC Media Action, participated in a covert UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) program explicitly designed to “weaken Russia.”

As seen below, UK FCDO documents revealed that BBC Media Action proposed working through a private British contractor called Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, now the focal point of fighting between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian military.

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The BBC’s secret information warfare initiative had turned the network into an arm of British intelligence, operating as an actor in a foreign conflict which its broadcast media arm was simultaneously claiming to cover in an objective manner.

Now, the BBC has shed any pretense of objectivity by hiring an overtly nationalist Ukrainian public relations operative to shape its coverage of one of the most heavily disputed incidents in a war filled with cynical deceptions.

https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/25/bbc- ... operative/

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

Exclusive: BBC claims Ukrainian nazis are exaggerated – but shows video of Bowen with nazi unit
by
SKWAWKBOX (SW)
26/03/2022

‘Risible’ whitewash downplays prevalence of neo-nazis in Ukraine – but BBC interview this week showed Jeremy Bowen interviewing neo-nazi troops

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The BBC’s Ros Atkins has published a video downplaying the number of nazis in Ukraine – bizarrely while showing footage of nazis in Ukraine. The video has been condemned as ‘risible’ and ‘bilge’ by commentator Peter Hitchens and others:


But on its flagship 6pm news on Thursday, the BBC broadcast a report from Ukraine by Jeremy Bowen with Ukrainian troops said to be on their way to fight Russian invaders, titled ‘Inside Irpin the town destroyed in the battle for Kyiv’ – and the report was full of soldiers sporting neo-nazi insignia, including some shown with Bowen himself.


The BBC subsequently deleted the programme from its iPlayer, but the video remained on the BBC’s YouTube page:

The yellow wording and insignia seen on the troops’ sleeves and chest tags – see the stills from the video below – belong to the Ukrainian far-right Svoboda group, including the three-fingered salute and the nazi ‘Wolfsangel’.

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The neo-nazi symbols appear so often in Bowen’s

Hitchens was withering about the BBC whitewash, pointing out on Twitter that before the invasion the broadcaster has published analysis about the extent of nazi infiltration, influence and coercion over the government in Ukraine:

Alex Rubinstein, the journalist cited by Hitchens as part of his dismantling of the BBC’s propaganda, pointed out that Svoboda’s neo-nazi youth organisation has carried out pogroms against Roma gypsies, is deeply embedded in the Zelenskiy government and was welcomed by US president Biden’s representatives:

Meanwhile, emails obtained from the old laptop of the US president’s son, surprisingly published by the right-wing Daily Mail but ignored by other UK media, show that the US was funding the creation of military biotech facilities – potential biological weapons sites – close to Ukraine’s border with Russia.

The BBC and other UK media had already been caught out publishing fake footage of the invasion, but arguing against itself about the extent of right-wing extremism in Ukraine as if its earlier reports had never happened – while showing footage of one of its senior journalists interview what appears to be a nazi battalion – is a new low. The people of the UK deserve honest news about the invasion and the reality on the ground in Ukraine from its ‘mainstream’ media, not to be taken for fools.

https://skwawkbox.org/2022/03/26/exclus ... nazi-unit/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 28, 2022 2:17 pm

New York Times’ Fear of Ordinary People Talking Back
ARI PAUL

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New York Times depiction of free speech as an open sewer

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Readers can now figuratively stand behind journalists at the newsstand, even though there are hardly any newsstands anymore. (cc photo: Ray Dehler/Wikimedia)
Samuel Freedman, author and long-time New York Times writer, often told his journalism students that they needed to keep in mind while writing copy that they wouldn’t be able to literally stand behind their reader at the newsstand. A writer must make their copy as clean as possible, the lesson was, because once it’s printed, they won’t be able to clarify what they meant, or even have any kind of dialogue with the reader.

Journalists don’t live in that cloistered world anymore. The readers, and their reactions, are everywhere. They’re in the comment section, on Reddit and on Twitter. They know what you look like, and they know how to tag you on social media when denouncing your last article. Unlike the typewriter clackers of yore, today’s journalists instantly hit publish, and within minutes their articles are torn apart on social media, both a sign of our advancing technology and the consequences of living in a free society.

Most writers, unsurprisingly, hate this. But over the last few years, this annoyance at the rabble’s elevation in the discourse has evolved into hand-wringing over the future of liberalism. The commentators aren’t just filling our inboxes, they are threatening the enlightenment and free discourse.

‘Fear of being shamed or shunned’

Hyperbole? Hardly. A New York Times editorial (3/18/22) denouncing liberal “cancel culture” as a threat to free speech has been widely ridiculed. It begins by asserting that the people’s “right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public” must be “without fear of being shamed or shunned.”

As many pointed out, this is a profound misunderstanding of free speech. As press critic Dan Froomkin (Press Watchers, 3/18/22) put it: “The fundamental right is to be able to engage in spirited debate without government intervention. There is no right not to be ratioed on Twitter.”

At FAIR, I have examined the backlash against so-called “cancel culture” for a while now. In coverage of the infamous “Harper’s letter” (7/7/20), I explored (10/23/20) how conservative outrage over social justice “cancel culture” was a form of projection, as the right has a long record of using its power to censor left-wing speech, for example on on the subject of Israel/Palestine. I also pointed out (5/20/21) how a group of conservative Jewish writers participated in the same deceit, painting themselves as the victims of censorship when they have been forceful in their efforts to cancel liberals and leftists–again, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine.

And recently I have shown (11/17/21) how the Times joined the Wall Street Journal in running a constant stream of attacks against “woke” politics, rendering the word almost meaningless, except the vague idea that any politics west of Clintonian liberalism constituted a threat to Baby Boomers’ opinions on cultural issues.

The most recent editorial is based on a survey of how often Americans have bit their tongues on voicing controversial ideas for fear of a backlash, which is supposed to underscore the fact that we live in an unprecedented age of darkness. The board tells us that we are living under a “destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture,” with people on “the left refus[ing] to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech.” The paper laments that the “full-throated defense of free speech was once a liberal ideal,” but that this has devolved into intolerance, because criticizing

people in the workplace, on campus, on social media and elsewhere who express unpopular views from a place of good faith is the practice of a closed society.

The Weisman warning
Jonathan Weisman’s Judgment Has Been Lapsing for a Long While Now
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FAIR (8/14/19) pointed out that New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman has a long history of making dubious claims—but generally in the service of conventional wisdom, and therefore unobjectionable.
This latest salvo against “cancel culture” by the Times isn’t a case of hypocrisy or about disempowering the AOC wing of the Democratic Party, but a rather telling case of how establishment media have failed to cope with a changing media landscape that has punctured their cocoons, because, if anything, we live in a media age defined by profound openness.

Consider the case of Jonathan Weisman, a Times Washington editor demoted and relieved of overseeing “the paper’s congressional correspondents because he repeatedly posted messages on social media about race and politics” (New York Times, 8/13/19). In particular, he had said on Twitter (7/31/19) that representatives Rashida Tlaib (D.–Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D.–Minn.) did not represent the Midwest, just like Lloyd Doggett (D.–Texas) didn’t represent Texas and the late John Lewis (D.–Georgia) didn’t represent the Deep South.

Thanks to social media, condemnation was swift (The Hill, 7/31/19; Salon, 7/31/19). Part of the outrage stemmed from the fact that Weisman singled out non-white lawmakers. But even giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he was referring to the fact that they represent urban areas, the idea that these are somehow culturally detached from their surrounding regions is so asinine that anyone who believes it probably shouldn’t be dictating US political coverage at the Paper of Record. There was probably a time when an editor could have made this elitist comment among friends over cocktails without consequence, but in the age of social media, exposing oneself like this is a liability.

The right to offend—not to take offense

Weisman made a particularly stupid error, but the incident reminded writers at the Times and other establishment papers that an intense backlash to their work could result in editors questioning their roles. Readers amplified by social media have at least a limited sort of check on the power of the press.

The Times admits that the legal challenges against speech are coming mostly from the right. But then the editorial board says:

On college campuses and in many workplaces, speech that others find harmful or offensive can result not only in online shaming but also in the loss of livelihood. Some progressives believe this has provided a necessary, and even welcome, check on those in power. But when social norms around acceptable speech are constantly shifting and when there is no clear definition of harm, these constraints on speech can turn into arbitrary rules with disproportionate consequences.
Bari Weiss Resigns From New York Times Opinion Post
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The irony of people complaining about how they are spoken to posing as free speech martyrs is lost on the New York Times (7/14/20).
Translation: There is too much speech. Conservative writer Bari Weiss wrote in her resignation letter (New York Times, 7/14/20) from the Times: “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.” At first, it seemed that Weiss was either just overly sensitive to tweets criticizing her work, or she was looking for a way to make herself out to be a martyr. But the recent Times editorial indicates that this idea that negative commentary on Twitter towards professional journalists is simply too intimidating, and thus has a chilling effect, is more widely held at Weiss’s former employer.

In fact, the Times editorial deploys the same kind of thinking as the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet (7/21/20), finding the attack on free speech coming from “woke believers” and the “secular left”:

They do not (yet) control the highest levels of government, but they evidently wield considerable power within state, corporate and cultural institutions. In articles, in Twitter mobs and in everyday conversations, they are reshaping our consensus about what counts as a legitimate opinion and what sort of ideas should be allowed to appear in the public sphere.

Again, the problem for free speech here isn’t that there isn’t enough of it, but that the wrong class of people are protected by it. If a professor or a journalist wants to go out there and say things that are controversial, then in a free society that means people talk back. Many times that yields no consequences, as calls to cancel comedian Dave Chappelle for a transphobic Netflix special or podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading Covid misinformation haven’t really hurt their careers. The insinuation is that the right to offend trumps the right to vocally express that one is offended, when, in fact, both should have equal value under the right to free speech.

The Kumbaya doctrine

And what follows in the Times piece is the true chilling effect, a line that seems innocuous but really isn’t: “Free speech is predicated on mutual respect.” Is it? Where is this doctrine of Kumbaya writing into constitutional theory? The American ideal of free speech is predicated on the idea that the government should not control printing presses, dictate what can be said out loud or limit how we peaceably assemble.

Lately, many free speech advocates wonder to what degree corporations, rather than government, are limiting discourse by virtue of the fact that only a few companies—Facebook, Twitter and Google—dominate the Internet. There is no legal argument that we all have to respect and like each other; we simply acknowledge that powerful institutions are not supposed to limit each other’s expression.

This editorial, with its appeal to niceties and decorum, flips this concept on its head, saying that discourse isn’t under threat by state and corporate power but by the fact the 99 Percent—students, readers, regular people—are getting too loud in a media ecosystem that is much more open and democratic than it was for previous generations.

Two decades ago, the late Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens (Wilsonian Quarterly, Autumn/04) observed the tendency of American political commentators to bemoan the intensity of partisan battles. But he noted that “politics is, or ought to be, division,” and that “it is simply flat-out mythological to suppose that things were more polite in the golden past.” A similar deception is happening here with the Times.

What the Times editorial is saying is that protecting the right of writers and academics to say unpopular things requires self-censorship for those who don’t have the privilege of being employed in the intellectual class. A columnist says something transphobic? Don’t you dare tweet about it. A television host engages in some casual racism? Better not put it in your blog, or else you’re contributing to the hostile environment of shaming that leads to self-censorship. Self-censorship by other people, that is, whose right to express themselves is presumably more important than yours.

The Times editorial is less about free speech than it is a protest against a shift in the power balance, anger at a world in which journalists have more exposure to the readership class, and to the reader’s anger as well.

https://fair.org/home/new-york-times-fe ... king-back/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 31, 2022 2:29 pm

MARCH 30, 2022
Depicting Putin as ‘Madman’ Eliminates Need for Diplomacy
JOSHUA CHO
Daily Beast photo illustration of 'insane' Vladimir Putin


Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, Western media have depicted Russian President Vladimir Putin as an irrational—perhaps mentally ill—leader who cannot be reasoned or bargained with. Such portrayals have only intensified as the Ukraine crisis came to dominate the news agenda.

The implications underlying these media debates and speculations about Putin’s psyche are immense. If one believes that Putin is a “madman,” the implication is that meaningful diplomatic negotiations with Russia are impossible, pushing military options to the forefront as the means of resolving the Ukraine situation.

If Putin is not a rational actor, the implication is that no kind of diplomacy could have prevented the Russian invasion, and therefore no other country besides Russia shares blame for ongoing violence. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Yet another implication is that if Putin’s defects made Russia’s invasion unavoidable, then regime change may be necessary to resolve the conflict.

‘Increasingly insane’
Western media have for years been debating whether Putin is insane (Extra!, 5/14; FAIR.org, 2/12/15) or merely pretending to be—speculation that has only intensified in recent weeks:
“Decision to Invade Ukraine Raises Questions Over Putin’s ‘Sense of Reality’”
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Daily Beast (3/1/22): “The Russian People May Be Starting to Think Putin Is Insane”
*Vanity Fair (3/1/22): “Report: An ‘Increasingly Frustrated’ Putin, a Madman With Nuclear Weapons, Is Lashing Out at His Inner Circle”
*New York (3/4/22): “Putin’s War Looks Increasingly Insane”
*Guardian: This article is more than 1 month old Decision to invade Ukraine raises questions over Putin’s ‘sense of reality’
*Guardian (2/24/22) : “A member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping told France Inter radio…he thought Putin had gone mad.”

The Guardian report (2/24/22) cited concerns raised in European official circles about Putin’s mental state:

They worry about a 69-year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.

Even when other media analysts argued that Putin’s alleged mental illness was merely a ruse to wrest concessions from the west, this was not presented as a rationale for negotiating with him, but rather as a reason to reject de-escalation and diplomacy. Forbes (3/1/22) claimed that although Putin is “obviously capable of massive errors in judgment,” that doesn’t necessarily mean that “he’s lost his marbles,” as Putin has only “gotten this far by being calculating and cunning.” Forbes‘ Michael Krepon went on to explain that the “mad man theory only works when the threatener is convincingly mad,” and that Western countries should proceed to call Putin’s bluff: “Help Ukrainians with military, economic and humanitarian assistance,” he urged, rather than pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Russia.

‘Detached from reality’
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Daily Beast (3/1/22): There is a lot of talk in the West about Russian President Vladimir Putin being mentally unhinged.”
In the Daily Beast (3/1/22), Amy Knight, a historian of Russia and the USSR, displayed a remarkable ability to read Putin’s mind, discerning the real motivations of someone she describes as possibly “detached from reality.” She attributed Putin’s decision to invade to a feeling of insecurity over his “hold on power,” because he “knows that he was not democratically elected to the presidency in 2018, or even in 2012, because serious contenders were barred from participating.”

This alleged feeling of “insecurity” has apparently driven Putin to hate “democratic states on his country’s border,” because he doesn’t “want his people to get ideas.” Knight claimed that all Putin’s rhetoric about “the West destroying Russian values and NATO threatening Russia with nuclear weapons” merely “camouflages his intense fear of democratic aspirations in his own country.” Strangely, although Knight speculates about Putin’s possible insanity, she also provides largely rational explanations for Putin’s actions, because if a leader is afraid they weren’t legitimately elected, they might opt to launch a war to generate a “rally ’round the flag” effect, as George W. Bush did. This undermines the suggestion that Putin is an irrational actor.

Knight suggested that Putin was more dangerous than Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev or Joseph Stalin, or even Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Khrushchev, she wrote, was someone who wasn’t “consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials,” and “had to consider the views of fellow Politburo members” instead of making key decisions on his own, like Putin allegedly does.

One of Khrushchev’s decisions, jointly made or otherwise, was launching the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which kept that country in the Warsaw Pact at the cost of several thousand lives. That invasion does not seem obviously different in kind from Putin’s attempt to keep Ukraine from leaving what Russia considers to be its sphere of influence.

‘Reason is not going to work’

Other Western media headlines offered quite specific, though varying, evaluations of Putin’s mental state from a distance. (This sometimes also happens with domestic figures like former President Donald Trump.) A few instances:

*Atlantic (4/15/14): “Vladimir Putin, Narcissist?”
*Independent (2/1/15): “President Putin Is a Dangerous Psychopath—Reason Is Not Going to Work With Him”
*USA Today (2/4/15): “Pentagon 2008 Study Claims Putin Has Asperger’s Syndrome”
*Sun (2/28/22): “Vladimir Putin Is Egocentric, Narcissistic & Exhibits Key Traits of a Psychopath”
*Fox News (3/2/22): “Russian President Vladimir Putin Has Features of a Psychopath: Expert”

These diagnoses from afar have been going on for a long time. In 2014, psychotherapist Joseph Burgo (Atlantic, 4/15/14) argued that “Putin may or may not be a clinical narcissist,” because it’s “impossible actually to diagnose the man at a distance.” Nevertheless, Burgo encouraged the US foreign policy establishment to assume he is a narcissist, in order to help “mitigate risk in the ways it deals with him.”
Pentagon 2008 study claims Putin has Asperger's syndrome
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USA Today (2/4/15) quoted a Pentagon report: “Project neurologists confirm this research project’s earlier hypothesis that very early in life perhaps, even in utero, Putin suffered a huge hemispheric event to the left temporal lobe of the prefrontal cortex.”
In 2015, USA Today (2/4/15) reported on a 2008 study from a Pentagon think tank that theorized that Putin has Asperger’s syndrome, an “autistic disorder which affects all of his decisions.” It speculated that Putin’s “neurological development was significantly interrupted in infancy,” although the report acknowledged that it couldn’t prove the theory because they weren’t able to conduct a brain scan on the Russian president.

The 2008 study was based on “movement pattern analysis,” essentially watching videos of Putin’s body movements to gain clues on how he makes decisions and reacts to events. Further reporting on the study (Guardian, 2/5/15) noted that the authors don’t claim to make a diagnosis, because that would be impossible based on so little evidence. The work was primarily inspired by Brenda Connors, a former State Department official, professional dancer and “movement patterns analysis” expert at the US Naval War College.

Psychologist Pete Etchells (Guardian, 2/7/15) mocked the Pentagon study because the methodology of using movement pattern analysis to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome is “so generic as to be meaningless,” and that trying to “figure out someone’s state of mind based solely on how they move is a hugely subjective endeavor, easily prone to misinterpretation.” He also noted that it is not possible to diagnose whether people are on the autism spectrum with brain scans.

Some writers (e.g., Guardian, 2/22/17; Daily Beast, 8/9/21) have criticized what is known as “Putinology”—the reduction of Russian politics to the analysis of incomplete, and occasionally false, information about Putin and his motives. It is a common Western media tactic to equate and reduce an entire country to its singular (and often caricatured) head of state, usually presented as a cartoon villain with sadistic and irrational motives, to justify further Western hostility towards those countries (Passage, 12/14/21; Extra!, 11–12/90, 4/91, 7–8/99).

‘Violation of ethical rules’
Some contemporary attempts to explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by psychoanalyzing Putin make sweeping judgments about his mental state, even while insisting that a professional diagnosis would be necessary to confirm their speculative perceptions of him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has features of a psychopath: expert
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Fox News‘ expert (3/2/22) is not violating ethical rules because when he refers to Putin as a “psychopath,” he’s not “diagnos[ing] a public figure who he has not personally examined,” but rather “assess[ing] Putin’s actions in the framework of a personality type.”
Fox News (3/2/22; reposted by Yahoo!, 3/2/22) cited forensic psychiatrist Dr. Ziv Cohen, who averred it would be a “violation of his profession’s ethical rules to diagnose a public figure he has not personally examined.” He went on to seemingly violate those ethics by opining that diplomatic negotiations with a “psychopath” like Putin were pointless:

“He’s not crazy,” Cohen said. “He’s charming, calculated and manipulative. With psychopaths, you cannot develop a common understanding. You cannot have agreements with them. They really only respond to superior power, to a credible threat of force.”

Fox actually cited one other source, Rebekah Koffler, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer for Russia, who noted that “other psychiatrists have evaluated Putin’s mental stability and concluded he is a typical authoritarian with no anomalies,” and that Putin’s actions “reflect Russian cultural norms and standards of behavior.” Koffler argued that the comparisons being made between Putin and figures like Stalin and Hitler are exaggerated, yet Fox only included Dr. Cohen’s pathologized opinion in its headline: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has Features of a Psychopath: Expert.”

Psychologist Emma Kenny claimed for the British tabloid Sun (2/26/22) that although she’s “unable to bring him to the consulting room for assessment,” she nevertheless feels comfortable making declarations like:

Putin continues to manufacture an “alpha male” persona. He is incredibly egocentric, and has a confidence and arrogance he does not try to hide…. Emotions such as guilt and shame do not seem to ­register with him—another key example of a potentially ­psychopathic nature.

As of this writing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hasn’t attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, while Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon, likely due to the US sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainian government. This silence on both the diplomatic and military fronts risks further escalation instead of a quick negotiated end to the war.

The Western media caricature of Putin as a psychopathic leader acting on irrational and idiosyncratic beliefs is a convenient propaganda narrative that excuses US officials from taking diplomacy seriously—at the expense of Ukrainian lives and nuclear brinkmanship (Antiwar.com, 3/10/22). Recent negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul were hailed by both parties as constructive, with Russia vowing to reduce military activity around Kyiv and northern Ukraine as a result (NPR, 3/29/22). It’s important not to let US officials subvert peace negotiations between the two parties on the evidence-free grounds that negotiations with Russia are pointless.

https://fair.org/home/depicting-putin-a ... diplomacy/

Just this morning two dimwits(rhymes with 'pundits') on National Propaganda Radio informed me that Putin wasn't giving up against the freedom loving Nazis cause he was not being given accurate information...These fuckbubbles gonna have to make up their minds: is he an absolute autocrat as depicted by the hoodle-heads above or is he a hapless dingbat surrounded by evil councilors? Any outlandish bullshit will do as long as it provides a flimsy explanation of why Russian action does not match the second rate propaganda offered by the Nazis, State Dept and Pentagon.

Actually they don't have to decide, they can have it both ways, the beauty of full-spectrum propaganda. 'One days it's this, the next day it's that, and the discrepancy is hardly ever mentioned, cause what's on the screen now is what must be true'.

I have just laid hands on a copy of Orwell's '1984', first time I've looked at it in over 50 years. The public library system in this county has 15 copies(guess it's still required reading in hs) and they were all 'out', had to wait almost two weeks. Just want to brush up and it seems others might have the same notion.

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British Bullshit Corporation Whitewashes Ukrainian Nazis
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 30, 2022
Finian Cunningham

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The Orwellian reality of the Beeb should make it the world’s “most busted” propaganda outlet, Finian Cunningham writes.

There is no Nazi presence in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion are merely excellent fighters, and Russian claims of denazifying the regime are cynical falsifications to justify aggression, according to the BBC.

In a sneaking way, one has to admire the aplomb of the British Broadcasting Corporation which promotes itself as one of the world’s “most trusted” news brands. While it smears and sneers at Russian news media as “state-owned” and “Kremlin propaganda machines”, the BBC is itself 100 percent state-owned and totally aligned with British government and NATO propaganda aims. That propaganda includes distortion and fabrication presented with the arrogant assertion of being independent news information.

Propaganda, old chap, is something that the Russians do. But not the British Bullshit Corporation. Oh no, heaven forbid, we’re British after all… fair play, objective, cricket, stiff-upper-lip, London Calling, fight them on the beaches, and so on, all the self-admiring epithets of a self-declared benign empire.

And so in a recent broadcast, the BBC’s ever-so smug Ros Atkins had the brass neck to assure viewers that there were no Nazis in Ukraine. He said it was a myth concocted by the Kremlin as a pretext for its military intervention in Ukraine. Atkins downplayed the Azov Battalion as having some far-right members who were negligible. He also claimed that the Azov Battalion was formed to defend Ukraine from Russia’s aggression that began in 2014. The BBC’s distortion of the 2014 coup in Kiev is astounding.

The BBC’s barefaced denial of Azov and others Nazi regiments in the Ukrainian military stands in jarring contrast to the well-documented facts. Images of torchlit processions honoring Stepan Bandera and others Ukrainian SS collaborators, images of Nazi flags, Nazi salutes, and Nazi insignia are abundant. Azov leaders like Andrey Biletsky and Olena Semenyaka openly pay homage to the Third Reich.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky may be Jewish and purportedly have relatives who died in the Holocaust. But he is owned by the Nazi brigades. His PR value as a Jewish face for the regime is a big asset (thanks CIA, MI6!). But it doesn’t change the fact that the Ukrainian military is a fascist force that waged a terror war against the Russian-speaking people of Southeast Ukraine for eight years since 2014 – killing 14,000 – until it was stopped by Russia’s intervention on February 24.

No wonder the BBC is covering for Azov when the British Ministry of Defense is training and arming their fighters, along with other NATO states.

In the same BBC broadcast, Atkins told viewers that the Russian army had bombed the Mariupol maternity hospital and the Mariupol theater resulting in civilian deaths. No evidence, no images of dead bodies. Just assumption of trust us, because, after all, “this is the BBC”.

Here the corporation goes from denial about the Azov and Nazis to actually promoting their propaganda lies. That’s because the BBC is employing and relying on Ukrainian journalists who are affiliated with far-right politics.

Civilians fleeing from Mariupol have testified to independent news organizations that the Azov fighters detonated both the hospital and the theater in a false-flag operation designed to smear Russia and to bolster NATO support for the Ukrainian regime.

What the BBC is doing here is echoed by U.S. media like CNN, NBC, and others. It is also a replay of how they reported on Syria where they accused the Syrian army and Russian allies of bombing civilians. The reality was that towns and cities like Aleppo were being held under siege by Western-backed mercenaries and their propagandists in the White Helmets who carried out false-flag atrocities. The BBC would tell viewers that the Syrian army and Russia were killing civilians when in reality the civilians were being liberated from a reign of terror. The same is happening with the Azov and other Nazis in Ukraine whom the BBC, CNN, etc., are whitewashing and promoting.

Ask yourself: why does the BBC no longer report from Syria? What about all those hysterical claims of war crimes against civilians when the Syrian army and Russia were liberating towns and cities? Why hasn’t the BBC followed up to interview Syrian civilians to find out how they feel about being liberated? The same BBC “journalists” are too busy spinning the next propaganda war for the British government and NATO in Ukraine.

This year marks the centennial anniversary of the “Beeb” as it is affectionately known. It was founded by the British government as a propaganda service. Earlier names included the British Empire Service. Up until recently, members of staff were vetted by MI5, the British state intelligence service. They no doubt still are, only now even more hush-hush covertly. By law, every British household must buy a TV license (£159 per year) to support the financing of the BBC. Failure to do so results in criminal prosecution and even jail.

The Orwellian reality of the Beeb should make it the world’s “most busted” propaganda outlet. But then again that’s what is so Orwellian about the BBC. It still retains a wholesome image for many people around the world. Even when the whitewashing of Nazis in Ukraine is its latest star turn.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/ ... ian-nazis/


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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 01, 2022 1:43 pm

New McCarthyism Silences the Black and Other Radical Left
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 30, 2022
Erica Caines

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New McCarthyism Silences the Black and Other Radical LeftSocialists, anti-imperialists, anti-war activists, Black radicals, and other independent alternative voices who challenge mainstream media and its political culture are being explicitly targeted by Liberals and Big Tech in a censorship campaign akin to the McCarthy era.

“I was a victim of the McCarthyite hysteria against independent political ideas in the USA— a hysteria which penalizes anyone who holds ideas contrary to the official pro-war, pro-reactionary, pro-fascist line of the white ruling class of that country.” –Claudia Jones


Freedom of press, like most so-called freedoms awarded under bourgeois democracy, is a lie. In the month since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, the U.S mainstream media (MSM), which functions as an arm of the state, has been increasing intensification of one controlled narrative: Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s war. Successfully crafting the crisis in Eastern Europe through a hero/villain binary, MSM has obstructed critical thinking, coherent thought, and historical analysis, ultimately resulting in the cheering for and backing of war.

To cement the use of the hero/villain binary and ensure mass acclamation, all media sources from Russia, like Redfish, Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, were slapped with the words “state affiliated,” alluding to the Russophobic suspicions that Russians (specifically, Vladimir Putin) lie and therefore, Russian media will lie, too. It is insidious for western media and private tech companies to label journalism from nations the US is at odds with as “state affiliated.” Not only does the language of “Russian propaganda” skew how information is viewed, being seen as innately bad, but it also attempts to signal that, somehow, the U.S. does not engage in its own tactics of (counterrevolutionary) propaganda.

The U.S has a proven history of lying its population into wars based on untruths, and weaponizing “human rights” to service the expansion of U.S. hegemony. Mainstream “journalism” in the U.S. serves as an extension of the state but, of course, does not receive these same “state affiliated” labels. Instead, US mainstream media outlets automatically position themselves as “objective”, “factual”, “moral,” and having the “freedom” to engage critically and investigate.

In a 1980 interview with the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, Maurice Bishop said, “…the stuff you see in the New York Times, what you see on all the different channels and on the radio— you really have no possibility of developing a different point of view. Because it’s all just aimed at pushing their point of view. And these are the same people who talk of the free press, the right to have independent views so that everybody gets to hear what’s happening. I mean, I can’t think of a more unfree press than the American media.”

Labels like “state affiliated” can be linked to the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 . Also known as the McCarran Act,. The stated purpose of the Act was to protect the U.S against un-American and subversive activities. This required “communist-front” organizations to label any materials sent through the mail as deriving from those organizations effectively curtailing freedom of information by inviting the persecution and harassment of persons who sent and received those mailings. As Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly notes in Constructing Deportable Subjectivity: Antiforeignness, Antiradicalism, and Antiblackness during the McCarthyist Structure of Feeling, “such discipline was neither limited to Black radicals, nor applied uniformly to them, they were nonetheless considered especially dangerous and subversive because their anticolonial, anti-imperial, antiracist, socialist, and pacifist forms of activism directly challenged the foundations of the American state:

racialized, militarized capitalist exploitation.” It was an imposition of censorship by construing information from a certain entity as ‘dangerous’ or ‘harmful’ based solely on political orientation forcing organizations to accept the government’s positioning of them as dangerous, subversive, violent, etc. However, labeling these Russian outlets as “state affiliated” has not been enough. Private tech companies in the U.S, as a show of solidarity with the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine, have begun to remove “Russian state affiliated” media from internet and streaming platforms to curtail what they call spread of misinformation (despite being the main drivers of it).

As the hero/ villain binary narrative of MSM attempts to sway the masses into taking a concrete position in support of the expansion of NATO to defeat the “evil” Putin, programs on Radio Sputnik, such as the Black radical show, By Any Means Necessary, hosted by Sean Blackmon and Jacqueline Luqman, have been removed from ALL major streaming platforms. RT America, one of the few remaining media channels actually maintaining some authentic journalism, has been wiped off major platforms as well. And while liberals champion this as a win for democracy, it must be noted that this uptick in overt censorship has not been limited to “Russian state affiliated” news sources. Lee Camp’s podcast, Moment of Clarity, was removed from Spotify. Over 500 episodes of Abby Martin’s “Breaking the Set” have been removed from YouTube. YouTube also initially scrubbed the Oliver Stone produced film, “Ukraine on Fire,” but has since put it back on for subscribed users only. Journalists are being locked out of their twitter accounts.

Socialists, anti-imperialists, anti-war activists, Black radicals, and other independent alternative voices who challenge mainstream media and its political culture are being explicitly targeted in this censorship campaign akin to the McCarthy era.

The liberal collaboration and legitimizing of “Russiagate” over the last six years gave political cover to this widespread censorship. Reactions to Trump, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and other right-wing fanatics presented a swift silencing of opposing views as the correct response. Giving private tech companies the green light to decide the voices that should be heard and the voices that should be silenced inevitably resulted in a variety of “left” accounts heavily criticizing the Democratic Party’s domestic and foreign policy being temporarily or permanently suspended over the years. Last March, Pan-African revolutionary blog, Hood Communist, was permanently suspended from Twitter with no explanation to this very day. The heavily propagandized political environment in the U.S. dependent upon hero/ villain binaries to push the Democratic party over the threshold to an election win and alleged “fascist defeat” created an environment where liberals proudly defend censorship of social media by private capitalist corporations and conservatives defending free speech and flow of information.

The scapegoating and collective punishment of Russians, Russian “state affiliated media”, and left voices has little to do with the crisis occurring in Eastern Europe or support for Ukraine. This is an amped up continuation of Russophobic hysteria as a useful tool in inciting and prolonging myths about an axis of Trump-Putin collusion to silence opposing and radical voices.

In 2020, Ajamu Baraka was correct in understanding “when certain ‘left’ forces went along with Russiagate, criticized Julian Assange, said McCarthyism 2.0 was a hoax, suggested that the FBI and CIA were honorable agencies that could help support the Mueller investigation, called any questioning of the role of FBI infiltrating Trump campaign and the state’s efforts to prevent him from governing as objective evidence of a ‘Trumpian’ left, and have been silent on Big Tech censorship [they] objectively created the conditions we are now facing with brazen political censorship and the first stage of a dystopian neoliberal prison.”

With the mass approval of the removal of opposing voices, MSM news sources and social media, which serve as sensationalized propaganda organs of the US government and Department of Defense, have been the primary avenues for people to get any information, serving as soft cover for the neo-Nazism in Ukraine by attempting to revise history to serve western imperialism currently. The people most susceptible to mainstream and social media narratives, in defense of and true belief in US hegemony and NATO as a benevolent institution defending democracy, have denied history and cheered on tech censorship, a police state and xenophobic violence. They have cheered on the banning of the Canadian dish poutine, and Russian cats. They have cheered on the removal of Russian scholarship in universities, Russian athletes from sports events, and even the historical fact of a Russian being the first man in space.

The political construct of the U.S is finding itself in a bind of contradictions, engaging in a cultural war over “Critical Race Theory” while uniting in the suppression of anti- imperialist and anti-war voices whether on “Russian state media ” or independent outlets. The mainstream push for political conformity with the U.S. agenda, thwarting radical movement, is allowing for the approved theatrics of opposing right-wing nationalism domestically while funding and arming it abroad.

Erica Caines is coordinating committee and outreach team member of The Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black working-class centered Ujima People’s Progress Party in Maryland. Caines is the founder of Liberation Through Reading. She is also co-editor of the African revolutionary blog, Hood Communist .

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/ ... ical-left/

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Despite US Empire’s Stranglehold on Information, Most of the World has Little Trouble Spotting the Villain
March 31, 2022
By Daniel Patrick Welch – Mar 19, 2022

Biden is a killer. Here’s why
Joe Biden’s vitriol against Vladimir Putin is so shocking to the ear that it calls your sanity into question when you listen. Did I hear this right? Is this true? He’s calling Putin a ‘thug’ and a ‘war criminal’?

• Not only is Biden directly implicated in bringing this war to fruition–this great plan of the CIA for years: to bait and bleed, to goad Russia into war with Ukraine. His administration fostered the coup that led to this. His administration funded the Nazis knowingly–openly paid for the destruction of Ukrainians in the south and east by other Ukrainians. Led by Nazis—yes, Nazis–don’t be afraid to say the word. Led by Nazis Aidar, Azov, Pravii Sektor, Svoboda, C14–adherents of Nazi ideology. Okay?

So not only are these Joe’s Nazis in a very real sense but this thug, this lifelong lover of murder has never condemned the policies of his own country that have led to massacre after massacre in the country after country around the globe. Never met a massacre he didn’t like, never did not support any of these wars and partial wars and sanction wars and infiltrations and invasions and domination of countless countries from A to Z.

And again it’s just shocking it makes you think ‘how did they get away with this?’ ‘How is it possible that this person could escape history and blame it on other people? And just act as if he can do so in a vacuum, with no one to check his facts, no one to bring up the alternative viewpoint. Which is the rest of history for the rest of the world outside his bubble.

US lies fool most, but only inside the West’s bubble
It reminds me of a t-shirt a friend of mine used to wear in college with a math equation on it that pretended to prove that 0 = 1 (yes, I was also a nerd). And until you find the mathematical flaw it appears to make sense. It all fits together. And in the world that we are now condemned to living in it’s because they control every aspect of our information. It’s incredible how much control they are wielding, especially right now. They’re shutting off all of the other points of view. All of the Russian sources are inaccessible. This is crucial if you’re talking about using this trillion-dollar military, if you are trying to convince people and talk them into actions that will undoubtedly lead to a wider, greater war– possibly a nuclear war. People need the information, if you have a democracy. But if you don’t this is best—and that’s where we are right now. You catch snippets of it no matter what you do. I try to completely shut it off–even the weather–because I cannot maintain my sanity and listen to this 24-hour cycle of crap.

People have to understand this: everything that they are seeing and hearing is a lie. Everything. In fact I’m not sure about the weather anymore, seriously. But certainly on the political side yes, everything– and you can’t avoid it. I know some people would accuse me or us–our side. ‘Oh, you’re the same you’re just ignoring…’ There’s no way to ignore it. It is everywhere. It seeps into your social media feed; you see it on YouTube chat groups; you see it on the wall of your friend, or everywhere, absolutely everywhere.

So no, we’re not shutting it out–we can’t–but you can access the side of the people who are being talked about: I can go to the Vineyard of the Saker. I can go to Moon of Alabama. I can look at something that I see by mistake: there is an NBC thing in the corner, it says “Russia Stalled on All Fronts, according to UK intelligence.” And again just like the T-shirt, just like Biden’s vomit. Wait a minute–that’s not true. My head just spins. I’m talking to people who live in Kharkov, and Kiev, talking to Russians, looking at maps that are gathered from satellite data, from the Ministry of Defense. This is not true at all–it’s the exact opposite of the truth. The war is over–it’s always been over. Kiev’s fighting capacity was destroyed in the first 48 hours.

Most of the world sick of West’s game
Now the Russians are going slowly because they’re bypassing major population centers, they’re encircling 60,000 Ukrainian troops! It’s not rocket science; anyone outside this shitty little bubble of Western thought can see this, anyone with any military savvy can look at this and say ‘wait a minute. Who is suing for peace and when? And what is the shape of that- how is that going to look? That’s where we are. But this fantasy world just keeps on going, and they think they can. Because guess what: they really can. At least in the PR world, at least in people’s minds, which is the important thing for them.

But it also really underlines the necessity now for the non-Western segment of the world to have their own everything. Not just PR. Because let’s face it–there is a material reality. You can’t just ignore and cover up things forever. You can do a good job at it but there’s a limit. There’s a new joke going around the Russian internet: Two soldiers are patrolling the ruins of DC and one says to the other ‘hey you know what? I think we’re losing the information war!’

They love controlling information. They’re good at it. But it still is not reality. But I don’t mean just that (the PR sphere). Obviously, we’ve seen now the in addition to the information war, the economic war and that’s starting to move. The West is losing control of their precious petrodollar. Through the moves prompted by sanctions, millions of ATMs are now being able to accept UnionPay, de-dollarization in general. Saudis considering accepting Yuan for oil. Rupees being exchanged for Rubles between India and Russia. All these things are part of building that separate world.

‘Putin is not a war criminal’
It also means every other institution–the ICC? Because everything is on its head. The ICC is one example. Putin is not a war criminal. He is prosecuting war criminals. Where will they be tried for the atrocities that they have been committing in Donbas over the last eight years? Where are the murderers from the Odessa fires going to be tried? They certainly can’t be tried in the International Criminal Court. Or The Hague?

No, there will be new formations. They’ll be tried in the Donetsk People’s Republic…? They will be tried in front of Chinese and Indian judges? Whatever–we don’t know yet. But we do know that this thing is over. Remember the Seven Billion. That’s the rest of the world outside of the billion or so people who constitute what they think of as the International Community or the Rules-Based International Order. 1/8 or thereabouts. 1/7—whatever–a very small portion of humanity. And we know who they are because they have always been those people.

‘Bono is an idiot’
Illustration: We’re just past St Patrick’s Day and we have an intellectual zygote like Bono who comes out and says that this Zelensky–this Nazi loving puppet president of Ukraine who wears the Iron Cross during a zoom meeting (can you believe that?), he’s the new Saint Patrick according to Bono. And being of Irish heritage but even more so as a student of history, I just feel this prickly revulsion. The great James Connolly is rolling in his grave. Theobald Wolfe Tone, Padraig Pearse, Robert Emmet—they would be just shocked that this person could not see who the villain is in this drama. And the villains are always the same! That’s the problem–that’s what’s wrong with these people who can’t pick a side.

During the Troubles, after the Bogside Massacre, The Wolfe Tones sang “’Round the world the truth will Echo/ Cromwell’s men are here again/ England’s name again is sullied/ In the eyes of honest men.” Because it’s always Cromwell’s men! It’s always Cromwell’s men in one form or another: These arrogant, racist bastards who think of us as less than human. Armed, raping and pillaging across the world from the lesser humans–the Untermenschen–because they will do anything. They will commit, condone, and sanctify any atrocity that allows them to keep their loot. Because that’s who they are.

And if you can’t tell the difference then you’re on the wrong side of history. Most people outside this bubble and inside too–because if you take away the ruling class of this so-called International Community, you’re talking a tiny percentage.

We are the Seven Billion! And your world is crumbling. And they know it–that’s why they’re fighting this so hard, why there are so many fake stories and so many fabrications and outright lies. Because they know that once people realize that that system, the five HUNDRED years of the yoke of the West’s reign of destruction and terror…once it can be challenged…? Well, then, it’s just a House of Cards.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 04, 2022 1:21 pm

Communication: Strategy for Wars
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on APRIL 3, 2022
Fabrizio Casari

Wars have always been fought to conquer territories, to plunder the riches of the sea, land and subsoil, for the strategic control of sea and air routes. Today, wars are also fought to prevent the growth of competition in markets, to redefine the structure of world governance, where a unipolar and a multipolar vision collide.

Along with the development of technological systems, the new weapon considered decisive in war scenarios is communication, because in the age of information bulimia, wars are also won or lost through the way they are told.

Paradoxically, the opinion that is formed about a given war sometimes counts as much as its military aspect. Because the battle ends, while its communication continues and transmits values, feelings, convictions and produces common sense, which are as important as the military story. Defeats are overcome, but opinions about the defeat settle and carry historical weight.

That is why the international media have quietly buried NATO’s last two resounding defeats: the first in Syria, at the hands of Russians, Syrians, Iranians and Hezbollah; the second in Afghanistan, where defeat was compounded by humiliation at the hands of the Taliban, to the point that Macron said NATO is “brain dead.”

Admittedly, the United States was the first to consider the value of communication in the defense of its interests. Freedom House came into being at the behest of F.D. Roosevelt, in 1941, when several associations were created in the United States whose aim was to prepare the country ideologically for war. They met shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor and established a common home in New York called Freedom House.

In 1982, the Republican administration led by Ronald Reagan decided to accelerate the US penetration and propaganda machinery in crisis scenarios. The NED (National Endowment for Democracy) was born and assumed the role of catalyst for agencies dedicated to political and military destabilization.

Today, the NED is the matrix of a series of governmental (and other private, but politically related) agencies that are in charge of organizing the processes of regime change and of transferring the unconfessable US interests to the plane of positive communication. In other words, war and domination of the entire planet to finance and sustain the US model in crisis.

The Vietnamese lesson

A few days ago was the anniversary of the Mi Lai massacre in Vietnam. Vietnam was the first war documented by television, which played a fundamental role in telling a different truth from the one proposed by the government. The documentation of that horrendous crime dealt a mortal blow to the image of the United States.

For the Pentagon, a strategic question arose: if the presence of the media could not be avoided, it was necessary to learn how to use them. This is why the Pentagon devotes enormous resources to the manipulation of information and disinformation, much of which goes to the publishing industry, which is inevitably affected. It is also present in the entertainment industry and in television and film productions. it buys space for its self-promotion and image campaigns. No other advertiser has such a large budget, which means that no one else has as much consideration, which often leads to a real identification of journalism with the advertiser’s agenda.

The adherence of information to the reasons of the military is dictated to be both part of the establishment, and of the elites. In this sense, the role of the mainstream media is really similar to that of an establishment press office, working before, during and after events so that the unacceptable is accepted.

The basic categories of a good press office, after all, are timeliness, credibility and reliability. Well, war communication has precisely these characteristics: it is punctual because it provides support in real time, reliable because it is believed to verify information, and credible because it does not publish non-existent news. But above all it is unique because it acts in the absence of dissent or even simple alternative sources of information.

Credibility is a fundamental asset for a message. But this is where the medium is more important than the message: the credibility of the military outweighs the non-credibility of the news itself. With the media’s support, the impossible becomes probable and the unbelievable becomes credible. The best example? Making the existence of “smart bombs” credible is like spreading the concept of “humanitarian war”. The generational mutation has taken place: information, which should have been the watchdog of power, has become a nightingale of power.

The change in the communication model

War communication was transformed with the first war against Iraq. For the first time, access to the independent press was forbidden: no journalist, photographer or television cameraman could enter the theater of war without being under the strict control of the military. Embedded journalism was born: the transformation of critical journalism into a journalism that tells what the military allows it to tell: finally a press office of the military apparatus.

To reduce the powerful international opposition to the war, images of death and destruction were completely absent from the screens and pages of newspapers. They wanted to convey the idea of a war without civilian casualties, “surgical” in attacking military targets, “intelligent” like the Patriot missiles. It was false, just as the evidence on chemical weapons shown to the UN by Colin Powell was false.

From a technological point of view, the war in the former Yugoslavia and the NATO offensive against Serbia in 1999 brought a new dimension to the relationship between war and information. In fact, it was the first war enriched in real time by the telecommunications network. The time taken to disseminate the news was reduced to zero thanks to the e-mailing of direct witnesses and the convergence of traditional media such as radio and new media such as the Internet, while military censorship continued to prevent public opinion from knowing the real evolution of the conflict.

The communication of the war in the Balkans had unquestionable merits, conveying the oxymoron of “humanitarian war” as credible and reconstructing history for imperial convenience. Horrible concepts such as ethnically based warfare have been assigned to the former Yugoslavia, concealing that the first to apply it were the fledgling United States toward Native Americans.

NATO wars portrayed as a video game

Today, the dynamics of warfare are exposed to the greatest media manipulation. Major international networks document wars in different ways, depending on who the attacker is. In NATO wars, the images are those of Patriot missile launches from aircraft carriers, from the wake streaking across the sky to the subsequent detonations. They look as if they were in a video game and the distance of the deflagrations only projects the explosions and not the effects on the ground on houses and people. The launch and arrival of the missile is promoted as a sign of strength, but the innocent casualties it causes are carefully concealed. The emotional dimension is avoided in order to reinforce the cognitive dimension of the reasons for war.

If, on the other hand, it is the enemies of the West who are fighting, then the images are reversed. The dead and the destruction are highlighted, and the most heartbreaking stories are constructed and amplified, with children and the elderly as the preferred subjects. In short, an attempt is made to build indignation and opposition to war on the basis of the emotions it arouses, regardless of the reasons behind it.

Then there is the method for forgotten wars. These are all those wars that, although they destroy entire countries, are unleashed by U.S. allies without the direct intervention of Western troops. The most classic example is the war in Yemen, led by Saudi Arabia, which in a few years has caused two million deaths in the absolute absence of images and words in the mainstream media.

The levers of the coup

The same happens in the so-called “springs”, the coups organized by the United States and the EU throughout the world. It was one of the most important inventions of the US military doctrine of the last twenty years, after the low-intensity warfare.

The sentiment that animates popular uprisings, always in the history of the latter against the former and always in search of progress and freedom of the peoples, has been transferred by imperial means.

Thanks to the manipulation of communication, the world is sold the idea that freedom and independence are identified with the Western empire and the lack of them in the countries that have not submitted to the empire.

The interference and subsequent intervention in the different countries is built with funds, personnel and ad hoc policies and the training on the ground of the groups destined to be protagonists of the coup are formed by the false NGOs that complement the activities of the American and European embassies.

In terms of communication, a series of codes of conduct are established, based on:

A) Construction of a bad image of the government, generally accused of repression, corruption, inefficiency and authoritarianism. Depending on the case and when the situation permits, nepotism or uncontrollable social violence, lack of security and ethnic discrimination are added to the menu.

B) In order to convince public opinion of a possible alternative, an image of the opposition is created and disseminated regardless of its real existence. The media present a democratic and peaceful opposition, conceived on the basis of the values of freedom against tyranny, which longs for the Western model of life that is forbidden to it by the criminal grip of the autocratic government.

C) Unleashing of the revolt sold as “spontaneous” and narration of the gradual involvement of a large part of the population. The narrative provides a circumstantial casus belli, which nevertheless triggers the revolt in a slow fire. The role of the university students is decisive, as in every protest movement and in every revolt, and the escalation of the crisis occurs with the apparently unprovoked murder of one or more people, from which a more aggressive level of protest may emerge. An important part of the script consists of images evoking positive feelings to which the government responds harshly, leading to the defection of soldiers and policemen, civil servants and ambassadors who denounce the government for which they have always worked and identify with the uprising.

D) Events are obscured in the part where armed rioters and the behavior of criminals are recorded, and instead are exalted by producing dramatic images of government reaction, whether fake or real. As in conventional wars, the manipulation of images and texts corresponds to the concealment of reasons.

E) Pure hatred stands out in the conduct of the coup, but is omitted by the media system, which instead disseminates images of a romantic character in support of the revolt. The pianist, Churchill’s victory sign, the tears, the slogans and the hugs become the images around which the righteous are counted. Which, let it be clear, are almost always beautiful, pure and compelling in their depiction of change.

F) They are also so because they express concepts in short sentences with an emotional effect, upon which to tell the next step, which will transform those same sentences into a mnemonic meme capable of penetrating any cognitive distrust of those invested by the story.

Information, therefore, is a strategic weapon for any war, whether procured or suffered. But its default condition is absolute osmosis between the political, financial, media and military systems.

The decisive stake is to represent a free world fighting against those who oppose it: the former being by definition “free”, the latter can only be “dictatorial”. No plural concepts or different models of democracy and freedom are admitted: the crisis of unipolar domination is too deep to be tackled with liberal principles. Not only against Socialism or Indipendentism: also liberal thought and democracy, sold as their doctrine, have become the enemy of those who claim to represent them.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/04/ ... -for-wars/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 05, 2022 2:11 pm

Pundits Who Advocate Hot War With Russia Are Enemies Of Humanity

Image

In an appearance on the MSNBC show Velshi, The Modern War Institute’s John Spencer explicitly advocated direct US military conflict with Russia due to allegations of war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

“I’m ready to commit at this moment — unlike I was before this day — to put people in direct contact with Russia, to stop Russia,” Spencer said. “Call it peacekeeping. Call it what you will. We have to do more than provide weapons. And by ‘we,’ I mean the United States. Yes, we’ll do it as a coalition with lots of other people, but we are the example. So put boots on the ground, send weapons directly at Russia.”

Notice the bizarre verbal gymnastics being used by Spencer to obfuscate the fact that he is advocating a hot war with a nuclear superpower: “put people in direct contact with Russia,” “send weapons directly at Russia”. Who talks like that? He’s calling for the US military to fire upon the Russian military, he’s just saying it really weird.

To be clear this isn’t just some arms industry-funded think tanker saying this; The Modern War Institute is part of the Department of Military Instruction for the United States Military Academy, which is operated directly by the Pentagon.



Asked by the show’s host Ali Velshi what he thought of warnings that direct military confrontation with Russia could lead to nuclear war, Spencer said, “It is a huge risk, I understand that. But today is different.”

Velshi himself was much more to the point than his guest, both online and on social media.

“We are past the point of sanctions and strongly-worded condemnations and the seizing of oligarchs’ megayachts,” Velshi told his MSNBC audience. “If this is not the kind of moment that the United Nations and NATO and the UN and the G-20 and the Council of Europe and the G-7 were made for, what was the point of these alliances if not to stop this? The world cannot sit by as Vladimir Putin continues this reign of terror.”

“The turning point for the west and NATO will come when the sun rises over Kyiv on Sunday, and the war crimes against civilian non-combatants becomes visible to all,” Velshi said on Twitter over the weekend. “There is no more time for prevarication. If ‘never again’ means anything, then this is the time to act.”

Asked what specifically he meant by this, Velshi clarified that he was advocating “Direct military involvement.”

“Lines have been crossed and war crimes have been committed by Putin that make direct military intervention something NATO now must seriously consider,” Velshi added.


When I called Velshi a fucking lunatic for expressing these views (to my mind the only sane response to such madness), he argued that going to war with Russia for Ukraine would not necessarily lead to nuclear war, claiming that “A no fly zone is not so different from the endless supply of weaponry the west is sending in to Ukraine.”

These are not sane or acceptable things for mainstream pundits to be telling people. Directly attacking the Russian military would indeed risk unleashing a chain of rapid escalations that could easily lead to full-scale nuclear war; there would be far too many small, moving parts for this to be anywhere remotely close to predictable or controllable. A no-fly zone over Ukraine would immediately put NATO powers in direct hot war with Russia, which is in fact completely different from shipping weapons to Ukrainian forces.

The fact that a nuclear superpower cannot be regarded in the same way as a nation without nukes has been basic, common sense orthodoxy for all major powers since Stalin got the bomb. This is not some kind of advanced esoteric understanding that you can only grasp if you’ve been studying this stuff for years; as far as I know children are still learning about the history of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction in grade school. This isn’t something you should have to explain to grown adults, much less influential mainstream news media pundits.

But it’s becoming more and more common. The line that we’re already in World War 3 and need to begin acting accordingly is showing up more and more often. The idea that NATO powers might be able to get away with attacking the Russian military in Ukraine without sparking a nuclear exchange is fast becoming its own genre of western foreign policy punditry, and that trend looks to accelerate with the latest (arguably pretty dubious) claims of Russian atrocities in this war.

Already we’ve got Velshi’s cries for World War 3 joined by the likes of Human Rights Foundation Chairman Garry Kasparov, who apparently spent so long training to beat a machine that he turned into one:

Image

You’ve also got opinion makers in outlets like The New York Times telling people that “The United States and NATO should be less deferential to Mr. Putin’s attempt to wield the threat of nuclear weapons — not only for the sake of supporting Ukraine but also to ensure global geopolitical stability in the future.”

There’s also the galling White House press conferences in which ambitious reporters aggressively demand to know why the Biden administration isn’t doing more to escalate against Russia, as clear an illustration as you could ask for of the fact that the mainstream press are only allowed to be pushy and confrontational with US government officials when they’re demanding more bloodshed.

As we’ve discussed previously, even if these increasingly loud calls for hot war between nuclear superpowers don’t immediately succeed, what they do is push the Overton window of mainstream discourse all the way over toward the most warmongering extreme possible so that calls for more escalation seem moderate and calls for de-escalation look like extremist apologia for Vladimir Putin. In the very best-case scenario they leave people far more open to consenting to far more nuclear brinkmanship than any thinking person should ever consent to.


This is not okay. It is not okay for them to do this to us. It is not okay for them to normalize the idea of escalations that could easily end humankind. That is the most insane position that any person could possibly take. More insane than Nazism, or any other extremist ideology you could think of. Supporting actions that may lead to human extinction makes these people enemies of our entire species.

Ukraine is still accepting foreign volunteers. If these omnicidal war sluts are so horny for “direct military involvement” against Russia, I wish they would just get on a plane and go do it themselves without trying to drag all of humanity into it with them.

You want direct military involvement? Fine. Go do it yourself. Be the direct military involvement you want to see in the world.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 07, 2022 4:08 pm

U.S. 'Intelligence' Says Its 'Intelligence' Is Bullshit

U.S. 'intelligence' folks tell their stenographers at NBC News that their obvious lies are obvious lies.

Image

That announced 'break with the past' of faking 'intelligence' happened when?

How 'rock solid' was the 'intelligence' about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons attacks in Douma, Syria?

U.S. 'intelligence', then and now, is pure imagination for the purpose of deceiving the U.S. and 'western' public about the reality of this or that conflict:

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.

President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.


Unlike the U.S. Russia no longer has any 'banned munitions':

The OPCW’s inspection teams have verified the destruction at seven chemical weapons destruction facilities in the Russian Federation. On 27 September 2017, the last of these facilities, located in Kizner, officially concluded its operations.
With the total elimination of Russia’s declared chemical weapons programme, 96.3 per cent of all chemical weapon stockpiles declared by possessor States have been destroyed under OPCW verification.


That is why the U.S. 'intelligence' claim of a potential use of Russian chemical weapons was obvious nonsense from the get go:

It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance. Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods.

Sure, devote more people for the 'declassification process' of creating mere fantasies or for the the reproduction of public sources:

Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight.
That 'declassified intelligence' Sullivan read out was the copy of a public announcement the Ministry of Defense of Russia had made on March 30:

Planned regrouping of troops in Kiev and Chernigov directions is underway.

The first stage of the special military operation conducted by the Russian Armed Forces in Donbas and Ukraine was planned to force the enemy to concentrate its forces, means, resources and military equipment to hold on to high populated areas in these directions, including Kiev. To bring them down on the battlefield and, without storming these cities to avoid civilian casualties, inflict such a defeat on the armed formations of the Kiev regime that it would not be able to use these forces in the main direction of our Armed Forces in Donbass.

All these goals have been met.

At the same time, the Russian army also solved another task, namely - in the absence of an inflow of fresh enemy forces from the western and central regions of Ukraine, through professional military action, using the absolute air dominance it had gained, also using modern high-precision weapons - to create all the necessary conditions for the final stage of the operation to liberate the People's Republics of Donbass.
...
Thus, all the main tasks of the Russian Armed Forces in Kiev and Chernigov directions have been completed.

The objective of the regrouping of the Russian Armed Forces is to intensify action in priority areas and, above all, to complete the operation for the total liberation of Donbass.


To claim that official public announcement by the Russian military are 'declassified intelligence' is of course bullshit. But NBC News stenographers won't tell you that. Instead we get more of this nonsense:

Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”

Does anyone believe that Putin gives a f*** about U.S. 'intelligence' claims?

No:

Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless.
...
The biggest success of the U.S. information offensive may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence.


Those 'accurate predictions' included the false claims that Russia would invade the Ukraine on February 11, February 14 and February 16:

The noise has become deafening.


US warns war could be ‘imminent’ in Ukraine - Politico, Feb 11, 2022

> The U.S. intelligence briefing included specific reference to next Wednesday, February 16, as a start date for the ground invasion, three officials — based in Washington, London and Ukraine — told POLITICO. <

Russian invasion could begin at any time, White House says - Reuters, Feb 14, 2022
'Could' is doing a lot of work in those headlines.

Can we get it a bit more precise?

DAWN RAID Russia set to invade Ukraine at 1AM tomorrow with massive missile blitz and 200,000 troops, US intelligence claims - The Sun, Feb 15, 2022
Russia will order invasion of Ukraine at 3am tomorrow, sources say - Coventry Telegraph, Feb 15, 2022
1am or 3am?

Which is it?

And in what timezone?


In fact, Russia had not decided to invade Ukraine at that time. The decision was most likely made after February 19, after the Ukrainian military had intensified its bombardment of Donbas and after the Ukrainian president Zelinsky had threatened to acquire nuclear weapons:

Starting in mid February the OSCE observers around Donbas noted in their daily reports a strong increase in ceasefire violation and explosions.

Image

Most of the violations came from the Ukrainian site and the explosions of the fired shells and missile happened on Donbas held grounds. On February 19, at the hight of the fire, Zelensky gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference. He prominently mentioned the Budapest Memorandum under which the Ukraine had given up the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the USSR:

".. Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt."
One of the package decisions Ukraine took in 1994 was the entering of Ukraine into the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Russia understood Zelensky's remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.

A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia's border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.

I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia's government to intervene by force.


The Russian military operation was clearly provoked. It started on February 24, months after U.S. 'intelligence' had falsely warned of an 'imminent' attack, eight days AFTER Ukrainian artillery preparations to attack Donbas had begun, five days AFTER Zelinsky's nuclear speech and two days AFTER the U.S. and its allies had implemented unprecedented sanctions against Russia.

NBC News, as well as other western outlets, allow themselves to be abused by presenting U.S. 'intelligence' claims they know are outright lies:

Game or not, U.S. intelligence officials say it has been successful. Intelligence is rarely definitive, and Biden officials have calculated in some cases that it’s better to pre-empt something that might not happen, rather than stay silent and watch it unfold.
“It doesn’t have to be solid intelligence when we talk about it,” a U.S. official said. “It’s more important to get out ahead of them — Putin specifically — before they do something. It’s preventative. We don’t always want to wait until the intelligence is 100 percent certainty that they are going to do something. We want to get out ahead to stop them.”


Edged on by the 'intelligence' community the 'western' media 'get ahead' and produce one lie after the other.

Here they are, reporting on some scruffy cat in Bucha, a town that had seen five weeks of intense front-line fighting.

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The recently sensationalized mass graves in Bucha were of its Volkssturm 'civilian defenders' and of Russian soldiers deceased there. They were dug on March 12 and had nothing to do with the recent pull back of Russian forces. Some carefully filmed bodies in the streets of Bucha have likely been casualties of weeks old Ukrainian artillery strikes. Others bound and killed there, likely by Ukrainian Azov fascists, were wearing white arm bands identifying them as neutral to Russian forces.

Only rarely do we get insight from 'western' media of what the people on the ground in Ukraine really feel:

8:58 6 Apr - In eastern Ukraine, some don't blame Putin for the war
Jonathan Beale, BBC News, Donbas

We visited the town of Lysychansk, about a mile from the front line. It's one of many residential areas to have been hit by Russian artillery over the past few days.
...
A Ukrainian soldier led us through the mostly-deserted streets to an underground shelter.
Inside in a gloomy room we talked to two old women, who were trying to keep warm in front of an electric fire.

We asked them who they thought was responsible for shelling their town - astonishingly, neither blamed Russia or President Vladimir Putin. They thought their grim situation was as much the fault of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky.


Whenever such rare reality reports, like the above or this one, come out, they get buried in an overwhelming stream of 'intelligence' bullshit and pro-war propaganda:

A video posted online on Monday and verified by The New York Times appears to show a group of Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops outside a village west of Kyiv.
“He’s still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping,” a man says as a Russian soldier with a jacket pulled over his head, apparently wounded, is seen still breathing. A soldier then shoots the man twice. After the man keeps moving, the soldier shoots him again, and he stops.

At least three other apparent Russian soldiers, including one with an obvious head wound who has his hands tied behind his back, can be seen dead near the victim. All are wearing camouflage, and three have white arm bands commonly worn by Russian troops. Equipment is scattered around them and there are blood stains near each man’s head.


For every atrocity Ukrainian troops and militia commit U.S. 'intelligence' will create five or more fairy tales of 'Russian atrocities' which the media, well knowing that such claims are likely false, will lap up and repeat.

The only advice one can give in such a situation is to always assume that it is the exact opposite of what any 'intelligence' claims that is actually happening.

Posted by b on April 7, 2022 at 9:28 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/04/u ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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