Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu May 19, 2022 1:37 pm

‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts
LUCA GOLDMANSOUR
In a break with the past, U.S. is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn't rock solid
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NBC (4/6/22) referred to making charges against Russia for which there is “no evidence” as having “blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”
Disinformation has become a central tool in the United States and Russia’s expanding information war. US officials have openly admitted to “using information as a weapon even when the confidence and accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” with corporate media eager to assist Washington in its strategy to “pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign” (NBC, 4/6/22).

In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as “disinformation” spread by Russia or its proxies.

The New York Times (1/25/22) reported that Russian disinformation doesn’t only take the form of patently false assertions, but also those which are “true but tangential to current events”—a convenient definition, in that it allows accurate facts to be dismissed as “disinformation.” But who determines what is “tangential” and what is relevant, and what are the guiding principles to make such a determination? In this assessment, Western audiences are too fickle to be trusted with making up their own mind.

There’s no denying that Russia’s disinformation campaign is key to justifying its war on Ukraine. But instead of uncritically outsourcing these decisions to Western intelligence officials and weapons manufacturers, and as a result erasing realities key to a political settlement, the media’s ultimate guiding principle for what information is “tangential” should be whether it is relevant to preventing the further suffering of Ukrainian civilians—and reducing tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

For Western audiences, and US citizens in particular, labeling or otherwise marginalizing inconvenient realities as “disinformation” prevents a clear understanding of how their government helped escalate tensions in the region, continues to obstruct the possibility of peace talks, and is prepared to, as retired senior US diplomat Chas Freeman describes it, “fight to the last Ukrainian” in a bid to weaken Russia.

Coup ‘conspiracy theory’
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The New York Times (4/11/22) drew a red line through Benjamin Norton for advancing the “conspiracy theory” that “US officials had installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.” Eight years ago, the Times (2/6/14) reported as straight news the fact that US “diplomats candidly discussed the composition of a possible new government to replace the pro-Russian cabinet of Ukraine’s president.”
For example, the New York Times (4/11/22) claimed that US support for the 2014 “Maidan Revolution” that ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych was a “conspiracy theory” being peddled by the Chinese government in support of Russia. The article featured an image with a red line crossing out the face of journalist Benjamin Norton, who was appearing on a Chinese news channel to discuss how the US helped orchestrate the coup. (Norton wrote for FAIR.org frequently from 2015–18.) The evidence he presented—a leaked call initially reported by the BBC in which then–State Department official Victoria Nuland appears to select opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be Ukraine’s new prime minister—is something, he noted, that the Times itself has reported on multiple times (2/6/14, 2/7/14).

Not having been asked for comment by the Times, Norton responded in a piece of his own (Multipolarista, 4/14/22), claiming that the newspaper was “acting as a tool of US government information warfare.”

Beyond Nuland’s apparent coup-plotting, the US campaign to destabilize Ukraine stretched back over a decade. Seeking to isolate Russia and open up Ukraine to Western capital, the US had long been “fueling anti-government sentiment through mechanisms like USAID and National Endowment for Democracy (NED)” (FAIR.org, 1/28/22). High-profile US officials like Sen. John McCain even went so far as to rally protesters in the midst of the Maidan uprising.

In the wake of the far right–led and constitutionally dubious overthrow, Russia illegally annexed the Crimean Peninsula and supported a secession movement in the eastern Donbass region, prompting a repressive response from Ukraine’s new US-backed government. Eight years later, the civil war has killed more than 14,000. Of those deaths, 3,400 were civilian casualties, which were disproportionately in separatist-controlled territories, UN data shows. Opinions on remaining in Ukraine vary within the Donbass.

When the Times covered the Russian annexation of Crimea, it acknowledged that the predominantly ethnic Russian population there viewed “the Ukrainian government installed after the ouster last weekend of Mr. Yanukovych as the illegitimate result of a fascist coup.” But now the newspaper of record is using allegations of disinformation to change the record.

To discredit evidence of US involvement in Ukraine’s 2014 regime change hides crucial facts that could potentially support a political solution to this crisis. When the crisis is reduced merely to the context of Russian aggression, a peace deal that includes, for example, a referendum on increased autonomy for the Donbass seems like an outrageous thing for Ukraine to have to agree to. But in the context of a civil war brought on by a US-backed coup—a context the Times is eager to erase—it may appear a more palatable solution.

More broadly, Western audiences that are aware of their own government’s role in sparking tensions may have more skepticism of Washington’s aims and an increased appetite for peace negotiations.

Normalizing neo-Nazis
Ukraine's Got a Real Problem With Far Right Violence
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In 2018, the Atlantic Council (6/20/18) wrote that the Ukraine government “tacitly accepting or even encouraging the increasing lawlessness of far-right groups” “sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not.”
The outsized influence of neo-Nazi groups in Ukrainian society (Human Rights Watch, 6/14/18)—including the the Azov Regiment, the explicitly neo-Nazi branch of Ukraine’s National Guard—is another fact that has been dismissed as disinformation.

Western outlets once understood far-right extremism as a festering issue (Haaretz, 12/27/18) that Ukraine’s government “underplayed” (BBC, 12/13/14). In a piece called “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence (and No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/20/18) wrote:

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and Front Line Defenders warned in a letter that radical groups acting under “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values” were allowed to operate under an “atmosphere of near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to commit more attacks.”

To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.
The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine
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Three years later, the Atlantic Council (6/19/21) was dismissing “the idea of Ukraine as a hotbed of right-wing extremism” as “rooted in Soviet-era propaganda.”
But now Western media attempt to diminish those groups’ significance, arguing that singling out a vocal but insignificant far right only benefits Russia’s disinformation campaign (New Statesman, 4/12/22). Almost exactly three years after warning about Ukraine’s “real problem” with the far right, the Atlantic Council (UkraineAlert, 6/19/21) ran a piece entitled “The Dangers of Echoing Russian Disinformation on Ukraine,” in which it seemingly forgot that arguments about the electoral marginalization of Ukraine’s right wing are a “red herring”:

In reality, Ukraine’s nationalist parties enjoy less support than similar political parties in a host of EU member states. Notably, in the two Ukrainian parliamentary elections held since the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in 2014, nationalist parties have failed miserably and fallen short of the 5% threshold to enter Ukrainian parliament.

‘Lead[ing] the white races’
'Don't Confuse Patriotism and Nazism'
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Contrary to the Financial Times’ headline (3/29/22), the accompanying article seems to encourage readers to mistake Nazism for patriotism.
Russian propaganda does overstate the power of Nazi elements in Ukraine’s government—which it refers to as “fascist”—to justify its illegal aggression, but seizing on this propaganda to in turn downplay the influence and radicalism of these elements (e.g., USA Today, 3/30/22; Welt, 4/22/22) only prevents an important debate on how prolonged US and NATO military aid may empower these groups.

The Financial Times (3/29/22) and London Times (3/30/22) attempted to rehabilitate the Azov regiment’s reputation, using the disinformation label to downplay the influence of extremism in the national guard unit. Quoting Azov’s founder Andriy Biletsky as well as an unnamed Azov commander, the Financial Times cast Azov’s members as “patriots” who “shrug off the neo-Nazi label as ‘Russian propaganda.’” Alex Kovzhun, a “consultant” who helped draft the political program of the National Corps, Azov’s political wing, added a lighthearted human interest perspective, saying Azov was “made up of historians, football hooligans and men with military experience.”

That the Financial Times would take Biletsky at his word on the issue of Azov’s Nazi-free character, a man who once declared that the National Corps would “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]” (Guardian, 3/13/18), is a prime example of how Western media have engaged in information war at the expense of their most basic journalistic duties and ethics.

Azov has opened its ranks to a flood of volunteers, the Financial Times continued, diluting its connection to Ukraine’s far-right movement, a movement that has “never proved popular at the ballot box” anyways. BBC (3/26/22) also cited electoral marginalization in its dismissal of claims about Ukraine’s far right as “a mix of falsehoods and distortions.” Putin’s distortions require debunking, but neither outlet acknowledged that these groups’ outsized influence comes more from their capacity for political violence than from their electoral participation (Hromadske, 10/13/16; Responsible Statecraft, 3/25/22).
Azov Battalion: ‘We are patriots – we’re fighting the real Nazis of the 21st century’
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London Times (3/30/22): You’d have to live in a “warped, strange world” to think that these gentlemen wearing SS-derived shoulder patches were Nazis.
In the London Times piece, Azov commander Yevgenii Vradnik dismissed the neo-Nazi characterization as Russian disinformation: “Perhaps [Putin] really believes it,” as he “lives in a strange, warped world. We are patriots but we are not Nazis.” Sure, the article reports, “Azov has its fair share of football hooligans and ultranationalists,” but it also includes “scholars like Zaikovsky, who worked as a translator and book editor.”

To support such “patriots,” the West should fulfill their “urgent plea” for more weapons. “To retake our regions, we need vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons from NATO,” Vradnik said. Thus Western media use the “Russian disinformation” label to not only downplay the threat of Ukraine’s far right, but even to encourage the West to arm them.

Responsible Statecraft (3/25/22) pushed back on the media’s dismissiveness, warning that “Russian propaganda has colossally exaggerated the contemporary strength of Ukrainian extreme nationalist groups,” but

because these groups have been integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard yet retain their autonomous identities and command structures, over the course of an extended war they could amass a formidable fifth column that would radicalize Ukraine’s postwar political dynamic.

To ignore the fact that prolonged military aid could reshape Ukraine’s politics in favor of neo-Nazi groups prevents an understanding of the threats posed to Ukrainian democracy and civil society.

Shielding NATO from blame
The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized
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Ilya Yaboklov (New York Times, 4/25/22): “NATO is the subject of some of the regime’s most persistent conspiracy theories, which see the organization’s hand behind popular uprisings around the world.”
Much like with the Maidan coup, the corporate media’s insistence on viewing Russian aggression as unconnected to US imperial expansion has led it to cast any blame placed on NATO policy as Russian disinformation.

In “The Five Conspiracy Theories That Putin Has Weaponized,” New York Times (4/25/22), historian and author Ilya Yaboklov listed the Kremlin’s most prominent “disinformation” narratives. High on his list was the idea that “NATO has turned Ukraine into a military camp.”

Without mentioning that NATO, a remnant of the Cold War, is explicitly hostile to Russia, the Times piece portrayed Putin’s disdain for NATO as a paranoia that is convenient for Russian propaganda:

NATO is Mr. Putin’s worst nightmare: Its military operations in Serbia, Iraq and Libya have planted the fear that Russia will be the military alliance’s next target. It’s also a convenient boogeyman that animates the anti-Western element of Mr. Putin’s electorate. In his rhetoric, NATO is synonymous with the United States, the military hand of “the collective West” that will suffocate Russia whenever it becomes weak.

The New York Times is not the only outlet to dismiss claims that NATO’s militarization of Ukraine has contributed to regional tensions. Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institute claimed on CNN Newsroom (4/8/22): “There’s two places where I have seen China carry Russia’s water. The first is, starting long before the invasion, casting blame at the foot of the United States and NATO.” The Washington Post editorial board (4/11/22) argued much to the same effect that Chinese “disinformation” included arguing “NATO is to blame for the fighting.” Newsweek (4/13/22) stated that Chinese disinformation “blames the US military/industrial complex for the chaos in Ukraine and other parts of the world,” and falsely claims that “Washington ‘squeezed Russia’s security space.’”

Characterizing claims that NATO’s militarization of Russia’s neighbors was a hostile act as “paranoia” or “disinformation” ignores the decades of warnings from top US diplomats and anti-war dissidents alike that NATO expansionism into former Warsaw Pact countries would lead to conflict with Russia.

Jack F. Matlock Jr, the former ambassador to the USSR warned the US Senate as early as 1997 that NATO expansion would threaten a renewal of Cold War hostilities (Responsible Statecraft, 2/15/22):

I consider the administration’s recommendation to take new members into NATO at this time misguided. If it should be approved by the United States Senate, it may well go down in history as the most profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War. Far from improving the security of the United States, its Allies, and the nations that wish to enter the Alliance, it could well encourage a chain of events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Weakening Russia
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The US War College’s John Deni (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22) argues that NATO expansion is not to blame for Russian insecurity, because “over the centuries…Russia has experienced military invasions across every frontier,” and so it was going to “demonize the West” regardless.
These “disinformation” claims also ignore the more contemporary evidence that Western officials have an explicit agenda of weakening Russia and even ending the Putin regime. According to Ukrainska Pravda (5/5/22; Intercept, 5/10/22), in his recent trip to Kyiv, UK prime minister Boris Johnson told Volodymyr Zelensky that regardless of a peace agreement being reached between Ukraine and Russia, the United States would remain intent on confronting Russia.

The evidence doesn’t stop there. In the past months, Joe Biden let slip his desire that Putin “cannot remain in power,” and US officials’ have become more open about their objectives to weaken Russia (Democracy Now!, 5/9/22; Wall Street Journal, 4/25/22). Corporate media have cheered on these developments, running op-eds in support of policies that go beyond a defense of Ukraine to an attack on Russia (Foreign Policy, 5/4/22; Washington Post, 4/28/22), even expressing hope for a “palace coup” there (The Lead, 4/19/22; CNN Newsroom, 3/4/22).

As famed dissident Noam Chomsky said in a discussion with the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill (4/14/22):

We can see that our explicit policy—explicit—is rejection of any form of negotiations. The explicit policy goes way back, but it was given a definitive form in September 2021 in the September 1 joint policy statement that was then reiterated and expanded in the November 10 charter of agreement….

What it says is it calls for Ukraine to move towards what they called an enhanced program for entering NATO, which kills negotiations.

When the media denies NATO’s culpability in stoking the flames of war in Ukraine, Americans are left unaware of their most effective tool in preventing further catastrophe: pressuring their own government to stop undermining negotiations and to join the negotiating table. Dismissing these realities threatens to prolong the war in Ukraine indefinitely.

Squelching dissent
An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm
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Alan MacLeod (Mint Press, 4/25/22): “These new rules will not be applied to corporate media downplaying or justifying US aggression abroad, denying American war crimes, or blaming oppressed peoples…for their own condition, but instead will be used as excuses to derank, demote, delist or even delete voices critical of war and imperialism.”
As the Biden administration launches a new Disinformation Governance Board aimed at policing online discourse, it is clear that the trend of silencing those who speak out against official US narratives is going to get worse.

Outlets like Russia Today, MintPress News and Consortium News have been banned or demonetized by platforms like Google and its subsidiary YouTube, or services like PayPal. MintPress News (4/25/22) reported YouTube had “permanently banned more than a thousand channels and 15,000 videos,” on the grounds that they were “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events.” At the same time, platforms are loosening the restrictions on praising Ukraine’s far right or calling for the death of Russians (Reuters, 3/11/22). These policies of asymmetric censorship aid US propaganda and squelch dissent.

After receiving a barrage of complaints from the outlet’s supporters, PayPal seemingly reversed its ban of Consortium News’ account, only to state later on that this reversal was “mistaken,” and that Consortium was in fact permanently banned. The outlet’s editor-in-chief Joe Lauria (5/4/22) responded to PayPal’s ban:

Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced.

As Western outlets embrace the framing of a new Cold War, so too have they embraced the Cold War’s McCarthyite tactics that rooted out dissent in the United States. With great-power conflict on the rise, it is all the more important that US audiences understand the media’s increasing repression of debate in defense of the “dominant narrative.” In the words of Chomsky:

There’s a long record in the United States of censorship, not official censorship, just devices, to make sure that, what intellectuals call the “bewildered herd,” the “rabble,” the population, don’t get misled. You have to control them. And that’s happening right now.

https://fair.org/home/disinformation-la ... ine-facts/

Goddamn Chomsky, he wouldn't apply that quote to his support of US policy in Ukraine, would he? If 'anarchist millionaire' doesn't say 'hypocrisy' then I suppose this warmongering doesn't either...
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat May 21, 2022 2:14 pm

SEVENTY-ONE YEARS OF ‘RADIO FREE EUROPE’/’RADIO LIBERTY’
Posted by Dan Kovalik | May 16, 2022 | Featured Stories | 0

HOW THE CIA-FOUNDED AMERICAN STATE-RUN MEDIA OUTLET SURVIVED THE SOVIET COLLAPSE TO FIGHT COLD WAR 2.0

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Originally established as an anti-Bolshevik endeavor, RFE/RL has thrived as US-Russia relations have nose-dived.
71 years of RFE/RL: How the CIA-founded American state run media outlet survived the Soviet collapse to fight Cold War 2.0
© SPUTNIK/ALEXEY VITVITSKY


The first of May marks the 71st anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (hereinafter “RFE/RL”, although this didn’t become the official name until 1976) – radio stations which broadcast into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, respectively. As detailed in an internal CIA document from 1951 titled “Radio Aims and Objectives,” RFE/RL was to be operated by refugees or exiles from the various Socialist Bloc countries to broadcast information intended to encourage “hatred against the regime(s)” and to increase the “will to resist the regime(s).” In other words, this project had an explicit function to remove governments unfavorable to Washington.

Undoubtedly, May 1 was chosen as the launch of this project as it coincided with International Workers’ Day, one of the most important holidays in the Socialist Bloc.

From its inception until 1972, it was the CIA which funded RFE/RL, though it did so covertly without congressional knowledge or authorization. And it was CIA Director Allen Dulles – the mastermind behind the overthrow of democratic governments in countries such as Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) – who greenlit the secret financing of RFE/RL in the hope that it would contribute to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Ironically, even as the CIA was backing this project, it was helping to restore fascist, military rule to Greece – which it preferred to a Greek communist government. The left-wingers had great political stature among the electorate because of their valiant fight against the Nazis.

The memories of this betrayal by the West in Greece were awakened recently when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared by video before the Greek parliament alongside a neo-Nazi Azov fighter, causing some of the members to get up and leave in protest.

The US and its CIA made similar choices in countries such as Indonesia, and later Chile and Argentina, opting to support ultra-right-wing dictatorships in lieu of socialist, albeit democratic, governments.

According to Cord Meyer, who took charge of the CIA’s relationship with Radio Liberty in 1954 and led these operations for many years, “[t]he CIA maintained control over [radio] content by formulating general policy guidelines, which were supplemented by daily meetings to determine the handling of specific news.” Meyer insists, however, that this control did not interfere with the journalistic integrity of the radio programs.

In addition, while Meyer insists that there were no actual spies operating within the radio stations, the radio personnel nevertheless kept detailed accounts of what they observed in the various countries in which they operated; in other words, they did provide intelligence for the CIA. And even after Congress ended CIA funding of RFE/RL in 1972 – the money would come directly from Congress from then on – its primary purpose remained to broadcast anti-communist programs into the East Bloc, at least until the communist governments in Eastern Europe and then the Soviet Union collapsed.

Of course, RFE/RL openly takes credit for helping to bring about this ultimate collapse, believing that its influence whittled away at the support of the various communist governments. It has found support for this claim from the likes of Vaclav Havel (who invited RFE/RL to move from its original headquarters in Munich, Germany to Prague after the collapse of the East Bloc) and Boris Yeltsin.

I recall quite vividly, as someone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, the incessant complaints that the Soviet Union would often jam the signals of Radio Liberty – evidence, we were told, that Moscow simply could not handle the truth. I think of this now as the outlet I am writing this article for – RT, of course a Russian-based news outlet – is being suppressed in the US or outrightly banned in the EU.

You may ask what this says about the EU and the US today.

RFE/RL would seem to be a relic of the bygone era of the Cold War when the US and the Soviet Union were vying for the hearts and minds of the world. Not only is the Cold War over, but it seems that most mainstream outlets – such as Fox, CNN and MSNBC – serve the same role as RFE/RL itself. And yet, RFE/RL continues to exist to this day, and indeed has received new life during the current crisis in Ukraine – a flashpoint which some observe as the beginning of a new Cold War.

However, the fact that RFE/RL has broadcast continuously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it begs the question of whether the first Cold War ever actually ended in the first place. Certainly, some observers, myself included, believe that the stand-off didn’t come to a conclusion, and we strain to understand why. I agree with John Feffer, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, who opined:

The Cold War, then, was not just about a confrontation between ideological foes. The Soviet Union dropped out of that competition and Russia under Putin continues to remain focused on concerns along its borders, unlike the USSR which sought global hegemony. The US, on the other hand, has not changed its attitude. And that, ultimately, is why the Cold War never died.

If Washington had disbanded NATO, pushed for nuclear disarmament, and helped to create a new security architecture for Europe that included Russia, the Cold War would have died a natural death. Instead, because the institutions of the Cold War lived on, the spirit of the enterprise lay dormant, only waiting for the opportunity to spring forth.

Of course, RFE/RL is one of the other “institutions of the Cold War [which] lived on,” arguably perpetuating the old Cold War antagonisms. For its part, the state-run outlet has justified its continued existence as follows: “With the collapse of communism, some thought RFE/RL had fulfilled its mission and could be disbanded. But officials throughout Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, many of them former dissidents, saw a continuing need for precisely the kind of objective broadcasts that RFE/RL provided, especially during democratic transition.”

Meanwhile, as the Economic Times explains, “based in Prague, RFE/RL was founded in 1950 as an anti-communist outlet to beam programs into the Soviet bloc, helping topple those totalitarian regimes nearly four decades later. These days, it still broadcasts in 27 languages – including Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian – to 23 countries, many where media freedoms face severe restrictions.” As related in the same article, “RFE/RL, which has a target audience of 37 million people, stepped up activities in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the occupation of eastern Ukraine by pro-Moscow rebel forces.”

With apparently no sense of irony, the Economic Times, in trumpeting the work of RFE/RL,states that “Russia very quickly understood that it is not necessary to lie to make successful propaganda. All you need is to withhold context and create white noise.” Of course, the US and Western media have realized the very same, with the situation in Ukraine being a case in point. Thus, much of the current Ukraine coverage in the West would lead the audience to believe that the crisis started suddenly in February of this year with the Russian offensive, while in fact there has been a conflict between the government in Kiev and the Russian-speaking population of the Donbas for the past eight years, claiming 14,000 lives. This missing context is indeed quite misleading for the casual news consumer. Moreover, referring to the Russian speakers in the eastern part of Ukraine as “pro-Moscow,” as the Economic Times and nearly every other Western news outlet does, fails to capture the very real grievances of these people who have been militarily attacked by their own government for years – whether they are pro-Moscow or not is not really the critical issue here. But, I suppose, one person’s propaganda is another person’s news, and vice versa.

After the collapse of communism, RFE/RL followed wherever US foreign policy aims were focused. Thus, as it explains itself, it started broadcasting in the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s as the US and NATO began meddling there, and expanded beyond Europe in the late 1990s to Iraq and Iran “[r]eflecting American attention to the greater Middle East…” Also, in 2002, RFE/RL started broadcasting in Afghanistan again – it had initially done so in the 1980s during the Soviet occupation but discontinued broadcasting thereafter.

However, the state-controlled outlet has never lost its focus on Russia and Eastern Europe. Thus, in addition to increasing its reach in Ukraine, RFE/RL “expanded on… local news efforts between 2016 and 2019 by creating websites serving the needs of audiences in the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, Siberian, and Northwestern regions of Russia.” Beginning in 2019, RFE/RL, after leaving for a time after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, began to return to Romania, Bulgaria and later Hungary, claiming that it was needed “in light of a reversal in democratic gains and attacks on the rule of law and the judiciary” in those countries.

With the Cold War raging again between the US and Russia – whether it’s viewed as new or simply a continuation of the old confrontation – RFE/RL will certainly have a raison d’etre for some time to come, and its congressional funding (it’s parent body, the US Agency for Global Media, received over $810 million in 2020) certainly be secured. While there can be disagreement over whether RFE/RL continues to be necessary after the end of communism, or whether it in fact can be seen as unnecessarily stoking old Cold War tensions, the one thing that can be said of RFE/RL is that it does not, and really cannot, hide what it is. That is, it is quite transparently a US-funded news source which broadcasts programing reflecting the foreign policy interests and views of the United States. It says so on its own website.

Indeed, its aforementioned parent proudly boasts that it must be “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States” and is obliged to have “the capability to provide a surge capacity to support United States foreign policy objectives during crises abroad.” Again, no secret is made of this.

To be fair, this, in my view, makes RFE/RL less nefarious than other institutions – such as private broadcast news or even Hollywood movies which we know are heavily influenced by the CIA – which claim to be objective arbiters of the truth and reality, but which really are not.

That’s not to say that RFE/RL is lying, but it is certainly giving a slanted view of the world. But again, because this is quite obvious, the audience can at least make an intelligent judgment about the accuracy of what they are being told. Many times, that’s the best we can ask for.

https://mltoday.com/seventy-one-years-o ... o-liberty/

One gets the impression that Dan feels that RFE ain't so bad cause they state their allegiance up front but that's bullshit. Unless it is stated with every 'news' item it is irrelevant, nobody pays attention to those pages. It's just another way electronic media can deceive without lying to your face and ya never know it. No better or worse than the MSM, who all require re-education.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon May 23, 2022 2:43 pm

Western Media Run Blatant Atrocity Propaganda For The Ukrainian Government

(This article contains reports about child rape which might be intense for some people.)

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The Ukrainian government is quickly learning that it can say anything, literally anything at all, about what’s happening on the ground there and get it uncritically reported as an actual news story by the mainstream western press.

The latest story making the rounds is a completely unevidenced claim made by a Ukrainian government official that Russians are going around raping Ukrainian babies to death. Business Insider, The Daily Beast, The Daily Mail and Yahoo News have all run this story despite no actual evidence existing for it beyond the empty assertions of a government who would have every incentive to lie.

“A one-year-old boy died after being raped by two Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights said on Thursday,” reads a report by Business Insider which was subsequently picked up by Yahoo News. “The accusation is one of the most horrific from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but is not unique.”

At the end of the fourth paragraph we get to the disclaimer that every critical thinker should look for when reading such stories in the mainstream press:

“Insider could find no independent evidence for the claim.”


In its trademark style, The Daily Beast ran the same story in a much more flamboyant and click-friendly fashion.

“The dead boy is among dozens of alleged child rape victims which include two 10-year-old boys, triplets aged 9, a 2-year-old girl raped by two Russian soldiers, and a 9-month-old baby who was penetrated with a candlestick in front of its mother, according to Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights,” The Daily Beast writes.

The one and only source for this latest spate of “the Russians are raping babies to death” stories is a statement on a Ukrainian government website by Ukraine’s Human Rights Commissioner Lyudmyla Denisova. The brief statement contains no evidence of any kind, and its English translation concludes as follows:

I appeal to the UN Commission for Investigation Human Rights Violations during the Russian military invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of genocide of the Ukrainian people.



I call on our partners around the world to increase sanctions pressure on russia, to provide Ukraine with offensive weapons, to join the investigation of rashist crimes in our country!



The enemy must be stopped and all those involved in the atrocities in Ukraine must be brought to justice!


This is what passes for journalism in the western world today. Reporting completely unfounded allegations against US enemies based solely on assertions by a government official demanding more weapons and sanctions against those enemies and making claims that sound like they came from an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia bit.

We cannot say definitively that these rapes never happened. We also cannot say definitively that the Australian government isn’t warehousing extraterrestrial aircraft in an underground bunker in Canberra, but we don’t treat that like it’s an established fact and publish mainstream news reports about it just because we can’t prove it’s false. That’s not how the burden of proof works.

Obviously the rape of children is a very real and very serious matter, and obviously rape is one of the many horrors which can be inflicted upon people in the lawless environment of war. But to turn strategically convenient government assertions about such matters into a news story based on no evidence whatsoever is not just journalistic malpractice but actual atrocity propaganda.

As we discussed previously, the US and its proxies have an established history of using atrocity propaganda, as in the infamous “taking babies from incubators” narrative that was circulated in the infamous 1990 Nayirah testimony which helped manufacture consent for the Gulf War.

Atrocity propaganda has been in use for a very long time due to how effective it can be at getting populations mobilized against targeted enemies, from the Middle Ages when Jews were accused of kidnapping Christian children to kill them and drink their blood, to 17th century claims that the Irish were killing English children and throwing them into the sea, to World War I claims that Germans were mutilating and eating Belgian babies.

Atrocity propaganda frequently involves children, because children cannot be construed as combatants or non-innocents, and generally involves the most horrific allegations the propagandists can possibly get away with at that point in history. It creates a useful appeal to emotion which bypasses people’s logical faculties and gets them accepting the propaganda based not on facts and evidence but on how it makes them feel.

https://twitter.com/AndreaChalupa/statu ... dxeRRKdKtw

And the atrocity propaganda is functioning exactly as it’s meant to. Do a search on social media for this bogus story that’s been forcibly injected into public discourse and you’ll find countless individuals expressing their outrage at the evil baby-raping Russians. Democratic Party operative Andrea Chalupa, known for her controversial collusion with the Ukrainian government to undermine the 2016 Trump campaign, can be seen citing the aforementioned Daily Beast article on Twitter to angrily admonish the New York Times editorial board for expressing a rare word of caution about US involvement in the war.

“Before writing this, the members of the New York Times Editorial Board should have asked themselves who among them wanted to have their children, including babies and infants, raped by Russian soldiers, because that is what’s happening in Ukraine,” Chalupa tweeted.

See that? How a completely unevidenced government assertion was turned into an official-looking news story, and how that official-looking news story was then cited as though it’s an objective fact that Russian soldiers are running around raping babies to death in Ukraine? And how it’s done to help manufacture consent for a geostrategically crucial proxy war, and to bludgeon those who express any amount of caution about these world-threatening escalations?

That’s atrocity propaganda doing exactly what it is meant to do.

Now on top of all the other reasons we’re being given why the US and its allies need to send Ukraine more and more war machinery of higher and higher destructive capability, they also need to do so because the Russians are just raping babies to death willy nilly over there. Which just so happens to work out nicely for the US-centralized empire’s goals of unipolar domination, for the Ukrainian regime, and for the military-industrial complex.


And that wasn’t even the extent of obscene mass media atrocity propaganda conducted on behalf of Ukrainian officials for the day. Newsweek has a new article out titled “Russians Targeting Kids’ Beds, Rooms With Explosives: Ukrainian Bomb Team,” which informs us that “The leader of a Ukrainian bomb squad has said that Russian forces are targeting children by placing explosive devices inside their rooms and under their beds.”

Then at the end of the second paragraph we again find that magical phrase:

“Newsweek has not independently verified the claim.”

The Newsweek report is based on part of an embarrassing ABC News Australia puff piece about a Ukrainian team which is allegedly responsible for removing landmines in areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces. The puff piece refers to the team as a “unit of brave de-miners” while calling Russian forces “barbaric”.

ABC uncritically reports all the nefarious ways the evil Russians have been planting explosives with the goal of killing Ukrainian civilians, including setting mines in children’s beds and teddy bears and placing them under fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Way down toward the bottom of the article we see the magical phrase again:

“The ABC has not been able to independently verify these reports, but they back up allegations made by Ukraine’s President.”

Ahh, so what you’re being told by Ukrainian forces “backs up” what you’ve been told by the president of Ukraine. Doesn’t get any more rock solid than that, does it? Great journalism there, fellas.

The Ukrainian government stands everything to gain and nothing to lose by just saying whatever it needs to say in order to obtain more weapons, more funding and increasingly direct assistance from western powers, so if it knows the western media will uncritically report every claim it makes, why not lie? Why not tell whatever lie you need to tell in order to advance your own interests and agendas? It would be pretty silly of them not to take advantage of the opening they’re being given.

This is something the western press know is happening. They know full well that Ukraine is waging a very sophisticated propaganda campaign against Russia and seeding disinformation to facilitate that infowar. It’s not a secret. They are participating in that campaign knowingly.


The mass media have been cranking out atrocity propaganda about what’s happening in Ukraine since before the invasion even started, like when they reported in February that Russia has a list of dissidents, journalists and “vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons” who it plans on rounding up and torturing when it invades. Funny how we just completely stopped hearing about that one.

And this is all happening at the same time the western political/media class continues to shriek about the dangers of “disinformation” and the urgent need to strictly regulate its circulation on the internet, even after US officials came right out and admitted that they’ve been circulating disinformation about Russia and Ukraine. I guarantee you none of these completely evidence-free claims will be subject to censorship by the “fact checkers” of social media platforms.

The fact that both Silicon Valley and the mainstream news media have accepted it as a given that it is their job to manipulate public thought about this war tells you everything you need to know about how free and truth-based the so-called liberal democracies of the western world really are. We are being deceived and confused into consenting to agendas that could very easily lead to nuclear armageddon, and if we ever raise our voices in objection to this we are branded Putin propagandists and disinformation agents.

It’s getting very, very bad. Turn around, people. Wrong way.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/21 ... overnment/

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From UK troll farms to covert psyops: the troubling past of Nina Jankowicz
Originally published: MintPress News on May 20, 2022 by Kit Klarenberg (more by MintPress News) | (Posted May 23, 2022)

The Washington Post revealed Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s highly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board,” launched with much fanfare just three weeks earlier, was to close, and that its director, Nina Jankowicz—former fellow at the quasi-state Wilson Center think tank, and Ukrainian foreign ministry communications adviser–had resigned.

The exclusive report, authored by Taylor Lorenz, went to enormous efforts to frame the Board’s dissolution as resulting from egregious sabotage by right-wing activists, who engaged in “coordinated online attacks” on its “well-known,” “well-regarded” chief, subjecting her to an “unrelenting barrage of harassment,” which served to “derail” the Biden administration’s benevolent efforts to tackle the “urgent and important issue” of disinformation.

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Jankowicz’s Pulitzer Center biography touts her myriad posts pushing government propaganda.

In reality, public backlash against the Board, which erupted immediately following its official launch on April 27, was wide-ranging, and anything but partisan or personal. Prominent rights groups and lawmakers expressed grave concerns about its constitutionality and the obvious risk of its serving as a state censorship mechanism, with many comparisons drawn to the infamous Ministry of Truth conjured by George Orwell in “1984.”

Many legitimate, vital criticisms of Jankowicz were also raised, including her history of slandering independent news outlets, such as The Grayzone, as “Russian disinformation”; frenzied attacks on WikiLeaks and its imprisoned founder, Julian Assange; and enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, author of the utterly discredited “Trump-Russia” dossier that produced countless wholly fictitious stories in the mainstream media, many of which have since been significantly rowed back or retracted outright.

While in Kiev, Jankowicz hosted the YouTube channel of U.K. and U.S. government-funded “fact checker” StopFake, which has endlessly whitewashed the issue of widespread fascism in Ukraine. Jankowicz herself is directly implicated in this shameful, misleading output. In January 2017, she presented an on-camera report extolling the virtues of four national paramilitary units, including the openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, linked to serious human rights abuses and brutal war crimes.

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OIP’s own website touts its connections to the British Foreign Office.

Lorenz’s friendship with Jankowicz notwithstanding, it’s rather extraordinary that one of America’s leading newspapers–which in 2017 adopted the slogan “democracy dies in darkness,” inspired by famous quotes in defense of the First Amendment, and condemning official secrecy–is lamenting the demise of a shadowy government unit concerned with determining what constitutes “fake news,” let alone was so enthusiastically supportive of such an entity’s existence in the first place.

“INTENTIONALLY FALSE AND DEFAMATORY”

Despite Jankowicz’s professional activities and public statements providing such ample fodder to critics, even her most vocal detractors overlooked her résumé’s most troubling aspect–namely, that she serves on the advisory board of Open Information Partnership (OIP), a British Foreign Office psychological warfare operation.

Details on when this role began, what it entails, and the remuneration she receives, if any, aren’t clear. It’s also a position that has been barely promoted, the only public reference to it online today being contained in Jankowicz’s Pulitzer Center biography. Then again, rather ironically given the organization’s name, OIP is itself markedly opaque.

OIP’s spartan official website sparingly styles the endeavor as a “diverse network” of “investigative journalists, charities, think tanks, academics, NGOs, activists, and fact checkers, active in over 20 countries,” which since February 2019 has “been standing firm against the rising tide of disinformation–in the news, on social media and across our public discourse–which we believe to be an existential threat to democracy.”

Little further elucidation of OIP’s activities and objectives is offered, but its founding “Partners” provide cause for concern. They include NATO propaganda offshoot The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Zinc Network, a British communications agency managing covert psyops campaigns–many explicitly targeting Muslims–the world over for a variety of clients, including the U.K. Home Office, U.S. intelligence cutout USAID, and the Pentagon.

Controversial U.S. and U.K. government-funded investigative website Bellingcat–a prominent disseminator, amplifier and validator of Western national security propaganda, which counts numerous individuals with military and intelligence backgrounds among its contributors–was also one of OIP’s founders, training journalists overseas under its auspices for two years from launch.

If those names aren’t sufficient to raise significant suspicions about OIP, the effort’s sinister true nature is amply underlined by a trove of leaked Foreign Office documents reviewed by MintPress News.

These incriminating papers reveal that OIP is the “flagship” component of a wider cloak-and-dagger effort to “weaken the Russian state’s influence” in Moscow’s “near abroad”—the constellation of countries comprising the former Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and Yugoslavia–bankrolled to the tune of over $100 million by London from 2017 onwards.

OIP alone received a tenth of that total in its first two years of operation to “use audience-centric communications to undermine the credibility of disinformation sources for specific target audiences” in the region and construct the “diverse network” referred to on the organization’s website.

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Excerpts from leaked British Foreign Office files related to OIP.

Members of this nexus are provided training in “best practice in exposing and countering disinformation” across a range of disciplines, from “open source research through to viral video production and digital targeting as well as cyber security, libel and data compliance.” Participating entities then increase the “pace, scale and quality” of their output and more optimally target audiences “vulnerable” to Russian propaganda in tandem via “campaign co-creation…[linking] the organisations across borders.”

Which would be all well and good, except the leaked files make abundantly clear that OIP isn’t actually concerned with countering “fake news” at all but is, in reality, energized by a desire to conceal facts and bothersome perspectives the British state doesn’t want in the public domain, via manipulation, distortion, and lies.

Take, for instance, the following passage in one document, which laments without irony that one of the key barriers to combating Russian “disinformation” is that “certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true [emphasis added].”

“Responding to inconvenient truths, as opposed to pure propaganda, is naturally more problematic,” the file explained.

Consider too the footsoldiers deployed by OIP to “respond” to such “inconvenient truths.” One leaked file offers appraisals of 56 organizations identified by the Foreign Office as potential network members, including OIP founder Bellingcat. Eliot Higgins’ much-venerated crack squad of laptop jockeys was judged to be “somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.”

Even harsher words were reserved for Tallinn-based fact-checker Propastop, which was found to have “ties to both the Estonian government and neo-fascist groups.”

“Propastop has been involved in inciting violence against Estonia’s Russian minority,” the appraisal damningly ruled. “Its reporting is widely considered to lack credibility and they have published a number of intentionally false and defamatory articles about Russian media outlets.”

Meanwhile, prospective network member International Centre for Defence and Security was found to be “funded by and politically linked to the Estonian state, specifically the Ministry of Defence, giving the appearance of independence without being so.”

“It is more respectable than Propastop, and is not linked to the far right, though it reflects the hawkish nationalism of the Estonian government,” its appraisal concluded.

Despite these condemnations, both organizations–among many other mooted members about which significant reservations were privately raised—became part of OIP’s network, granting them Foreign Office financing, support and promotion and ostensibly placing their output and operations under the guidance of Jankowicz.

“RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE”

Given this composition, it was perhaps unsurprisingly well-understood internally that OIP “[being] interpreted as a UK-sponsored disinformation or ‘troll factory’” was a significant risk.

To mitigate this hazard, Zinc Network pledged to “position the project externally as being within the established and accepted sector of media development and pluralism and fact checking” [emphasis added]. Which no doubt accounts for all the lofty references to defending democracy on OIP’s website today.

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A screen grab of a leaked file from the British Foreign Office.

The leaked documents contain numerous troubling examples of OIP at work.

For example, in Ukraine, it trained 12 online influencers “to counter Kremlin-backed messaging through innovative editorial strategies, audience segmentation, and production models,” helping their “compelling content” reach “millions of people.” In Russia and Central Asia, a network of YouTubers was secretly paid to create videos promoting “democratic values”; “project communications” were carefully concealed to ensure the network’s existence, and London’s role in managing it was kept “confidential.”

Meanwhile, in the Baltic states, online personalities received unadvertised “personal brand strategy informed by individual target audience analysis, growth strategies for their chosen social media platform, and digital marketing and campaign training.”

Quite clearly, far from fostering independent citizen journalism, these initiatives were pure astroturfing, the creation of a hand-picked clandestine nexus of effective British agents helped by OIP to generate slick propaganda–reading scripts effectively prepared by the Foreign Office–which was then amplified globally by the organization’s network members. There are obvious echoes in this of the U.S. National Security Council giving direct briefings to TikTok stars on Washington’s “strategic goals” in the Ukraine conflict.

Underlining this interpretation further, Zinc Network boasts of maintaining its influencer networks “over extended periods of time, enabling us to deliver both long-term strategic messaging to audiences, but also to conduct multi-layered ‘rapid response’ communications following key events.”

One such “key” event cited was an April 2018 protest in Moscow against restrictions on the use of messaging app Telegram. Zinc was “able to activate a range of content within 12 hours” of the demonstration beginning. It’s almost inconceivable that at least some of this output didn’t worm its way into the Western media, which gave the upheaval almost blanket coverage. If so, domestic audiences would have been totally unaware that it was in fact funded and co-produced by London.

Still, that’s an open question—as is the extent to which OIP has influenced the outcome of elections “taking place in countries of particular interest” [emphasis added] to the Foreign Office, one of the organization’s key objectives. Network members are trained in “identifying key trends and flashpoints in activity or narratives” during campaigns and to “intensify” their propaganda output as polling day nears.

In the May 2019 North Macedonian presidential vote–which pitted pro-European Union, pro-NATO candidate Stevo Pendarovski against Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, a more pro-Russian figure–OIP’s founding members, including Bellingcat, were flown into the country, providing two weeks’ intensive training to a local media outlet. Pendarovski prevailed, although only after the first round of voting produced a virtual tie. Did OIP help push him over the line?

Whatever the truth of the matter, it can only be considered a perverse irony that in July 2020, Bellingcat published a report on alleged “Russian interference” in North Macedonia ahead of the country’s parliamentary election.

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OIP partners were actively involved in attempting to influence the outcome of elections in Macedonia.

In November of that year, Moldova had a presidential vote of its own, which saw similar candidates square off–the pro-Russian incumbent Igor Dodon and pro-Western upstart Maia Sandu. The latter prevailed, an upset that the mainstream media acknowledged came as a surprise.

OIP member MEMO 98, a Slovakia-based election monitor, released an in-depth study of the election thereafter, attributing Sandu’s shock win to her social media skills. OIP ranks Moldova as inhabiting “the most vital space” in its network, owing to the region being purportedly “subsumed almost entirely within Russia’s sphere of influence.”

Accordingly, two Chisinau-based organizations, the Association of Independent Press and Newsmaker, are OIP members. MEMO 98 could have been instrumental in “identifying key trends and flashpoints in activity or narratives” over the election campaign, its findings informing “compelling content” to be broadcast via the pair and a more comprehensive OIP network locally and internationally, in support of Sandu’s candidacy.

TO BE CONTINUED?

Keeping the internal workings of OIP as closely guarded from the outside world as possible was of paramount importance to the Foreign Office.

A section on “risk management” strategies for the project in one document deemed it “vital” that OIP’s head office have a dedicated security team, “resourced with qualified personnel,” including “former military and security services” operatives. All employees and network members are “subject to national security vetting,” with the operation based “in a nondescript building that avoids attention,” precise coordinates unknown.

The location of its headquarters is not advertised or known; all windows are “tinted from external view”; strict “access controls”–including “reinforced airlocked doors,” CCTV, and a “segregated meeting room” for “sensitive briefings”–are also in place. A similarly intense veil of secrecy shrouded the DHS Disinformation Governance Board.

Having launched the DGB without any clarity whatsoever regarding its functions, responsibilities, and how and whether it would be regulated or subject to democratic oversight, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas responded to the initial wave of censure by offering reassurances that the unit would have no operational capabilities, and absolutely would not monitor or police U.S. citizens’ statements on- or off-line, instead simply accumulating “best practices” for counter-disinformation.

Such promises inevitably did little to inspire confidence–there quite obviously seems little purpose or sense in creating a new division of a federal executive department that has no operational powers, or at least won’t at a later date. And indeed the CIA and NSA are similarly prohibited by law from domestic activities–yet both routinely flout this crucial restriction without compunction or consequence.

Subsequently, the DHS issued a factsheet promising that the Board would merely keep track of black propaganda spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China, and Iran,” adding that the Department was “deeply committed to doing all of its work in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy.”

Of course, numerous other Western state and quasi-state anti-disinformation efforts–which serve as establishment censorship mechanisms, validating establishment news organizations while blacklisting and maligning alternative U.S.-based media, including MintPress–claim to be similarly committed to those principles. Such as Open Information Partnership, for example, a particularly blatant example of the emergent, aggressive trend toward direct state diktat over what’s true and false, and what citizens are allowed to know.

As such, it’s incumbent to ask whether the organization represented a blueprint for the Disinformation Governance Board; whether Jankowicz’s role in it was a factor in her recruitment by the DHS; and whether apologetic obituaries published by The Washington Pos t and The New York Times–which falsely claimed the Board’s cessation was influenced by “disinformation”–are a reflection of how both outlets stood to materially benefit from its operation.

The body’s rapid, unceremonious termination represents a not insignificant victory for people power: concerned citizens, independent journalists and researchers led the charge in sounding the alarm. However, there is little reason to believe the threat has been permanently vanquished. In fact, that the public was able to successfully challenge the warm welcome extended to Jankowicz by the majority of mainstream pundits and pressure officials to scuttle the venture has no doubt reinforced the necessity of the Board’s mission.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/23/from-uk ... rt-psyops/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri May 27, 2022 2:17 pm

Press Makes Trump, Not Voting Rights, the Primary Issue
JULIE HOLLAR

Press Makes Trump, Not Voting Rights, the Primary Issue

Kemp, Raffensperger win in blow to Trump and his false election claims
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The Washington Post (5/24/22) reported that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s GOP primary win “threatened Trump’s reputation as GOP kingmaker.”
The country’s centrist corporate media have decided what this year’s primaries are mainly about: Donald Trump.

In the wake of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election and continued efforts by the Republican Party to undermine democratic processes, corporate media remain fixated on Trump’s role in the party, seeing the 2022 primaries as a series of referenda on Trump and his role as kingmaker. But the focus on Trump obscures the even more important story that Trump represents: the GOP assault on democracy, which is being carried out only marginally less aggressively by many of those “defeating” him.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is the perfect example of this. After this week’s state primaries, most corporate media made their lead story the losses of Trump-backed candidates, in particular to Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who both played very public roles in refusing to bow to Trump’s demands to “find” votes for him in Georgia in 2020.

The Washington Post (5/24/22) declared, “Kemp, Raffensperger Win in Blow to Trump and His False Election Claims.” A New York Times (5/24/22) subhead read, “The victories in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, handed the former president his biggest primary season setback so far.” At Reuters (5/24/22), the top “takeaway” subhead read: “Trump Takes Lumps.”

These are stories centrist media like to tell: The voters are sensibly rejecting extremists from their party, so the “moderate” candidates are taking the right path. Journalists tell this story over and over in coverage of Democratic primaries, with “move to the center” stories encouraging the party to reject its progressive candidates. The problem is, candidates like Kemp and Raffensperger are not moderate, except in comparison to Trump—and painting the story as one centrally about Trump obscures the anti-democratic nature of those who defeated his hand-picked candidates.
Kemp Cruises to Victory in Georgia, Delaing Blow to Trump but Not His Voter Fraud Lies
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The Boston Globe (5/24/22) noted that “Kemp had not beaten back the 2020 doubts of voters [who thought that election “stolen”]; he simply found a different way to champion them than Trump.”
The Boston Globe demonstrated that this contradiction could be addressed, with an article (5/24/22) headlined, “Kemp Cruises to Victory in Georgia, Dealing Blow to Trump but Not His Voter Fraud Lies.”
The Globe‘s Jess Bidgood reported:

Kemp’s easy win over Perdue on Tuesday may seem to suggest that the former president and his baseless insistence that fraud and irregularities cost him the election have lost their iron grip on the Republican Party….

Even though he stood up to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Kemp found other ways to assuage the GOP base’s unfounded doubts about the issue. He signed a voting bill that added new hurdles to absentee voting and handed some election oversight power over to the Republican-controlled legislature. He spoke of “election integrity” everywhere he went, while Raffensperger leaned into the issue as well.

But even this didn’t go nearly far enough in describing Kemp and Raffensperger’s histories of attacking voting rights. As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp for years vigorously promoted false election fraud stories and made Georgia a hotspot for undermining voting rights. He aggressively investigated groups that helped register voters of color; in 2014, he launched a criminal investigation into Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project—which was helping to register tens of thousands of Black Georgians who previously hadn’t voted—calling their activities “voter fraud.” His investigation ultimately uncovered no wrongdoing (New Republic, 5/5/15).

Kemp oversaw the rejection of tens of thousands of voter registrations on technicalities like missing accents or typos (Atlantic, 11/7/18) and improperly purged hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls prior to the 2018 election (Rolling Stone, 10/27/18), disproportionately impacting voters of color (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 3/12/20). He refused to recuse himself from overseeing his own race for governor against Abrams, drawing rebukes from former president, Georgia native and fair elections advocate Jimmy Carter (The Nation, 10/29/18), among others. Kemp ran that governor’s race as a “Trump conservative.”

None of Kemp’s history as anti–voting rights secretary of state was mentioned in any of the next-day election coverage FAIR surveyed. (There was an opinion piece on CNN.com on May 26 that detailed “Kemp’s appalling anti-democracy conduct.”)

As governor, Kemp has further eroded voting rights in Georgia, as mentioned by the Globe (a story that the media managed to both-sides at the time—FAIR.org, 4/8/21). He has also taken a hard-right stance on many other rights issues, signing into law a bill to prohibit “divisive concepts” from being taught in schools, a bill to ban abortions as early as six weeks and a bill discriminating against transgender kids in sports.

Like Kemp, Raffensperger was an early supporter of Trump who pushed election fraud stories and voter suppression tactics. As FAIR (3/5/21) pointed out at the time, centrist media fawned over Raffensperger for standing up to Trump in the 2020 election, ignoring his “support of the little lies that made the Big Lie possible.”
A principled stand where it counts
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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (1/4/21) editorialized that Georgia Secretary of State Brad “Raffensperger deserves kudos from all Georgians for continuing a principled stand for what is right,” weeks after reporting (12/17/20) that “the secretary has helped fuel suspicions about the integrity of Georgia’s elections.”
For instance, just weeks before an uncritical editorial (1/4/21) praising him, the local Journal-Constitution published a front-page investigation (12/17/20) that found Raffensperger was touting “inflated figures about the number of investigations his office was conducting related to the election, giving those seeking to sow doubt in the outcome a new storyline.” Those claims helped propel the state’s 2020 bill restricting voting rights.

Like Kemp, he launched vote fraud investigations into progressive voter registration groups (AJC, 11/30/20), and oversaw the purge of nearly 200,000 voters, mostly people of color, from the rolls before the 2020 election (Democracy Now!, 1/5/21).

During his re-election campaign, Raffensperger had gone on national television (CBS, 1/9/22) to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting noncitizens from voting in any elections, as well as to praise photo ID requirements for voting and oppose same-day voter registration. He has also called for an expansion of law enforcement presence at polling sites.

In their obsession with Trump’s win/loss record and their desperate search for “moderate” Republicans, journalists whitewash GOP candidates who paved the way for Trumpism and, ultimately, seek the same end—minority rule—by only slightly different means.

https://fair.org/home/press-makes-trump ... ary-issue/

'The press is obsessed with Trump', well, no shit, Sherlock. But they are ignoring the Republicans who are damn near as bad on voting issues. Hmm...

All this nattering reveals is that this outlet is a Democratic Party partisan. Which is obvious and no big deal, expected, but it does lead to some self-inflicted blindness. Because these partisans cannot speak the very damaging truth, which is that 'Trump' is all that the Dems and Biden have to run on. The pandemic poorly handled, the legislative program a train wreck, the economy on the brink and now the war which Biden incited about to blow up in his confused face. So what's left? Trump! Which they hope and pray will be their trump card, cause they ain't got jack otherwise. What we see here is 'Plan B': paint these folks as 'NTINO', 'Not Trump In Name Only'. And mebbe some or even most of them are, but the point is the necessity when ya ain't got nothing else. They hope that Trump will be the cattle prod driving otherwise recalcitrant voters to pull the donkey tail.

The Democratic Party remains, on the tactical surface, the worst political party in history.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat May 28, 2022 2:03 pm

YouTube’s Biggest Info Channels Carry Corporate News, Not Alternative Views
OLIVIA RIGGIO
Corporate owners of leading YouTube news channels

Despite the proliferation of fringe ideologies on YouTube—and the availability of truly alternative information there—the video hosting service’s anti-establishment status may be overblown. A FAIR analysis of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube news channels worldwide found that the majority of the top news channels on the platform are not independent.

YouTube has a reputation for hosting news that challenges the status quo. In 2020, a Pew Research Center study highlighted YouTube’s potential to spotlight more independent news sources, indicating that 42% of YouTube news channels are not affiliated with a traditional news outlet.

The shadow side of that finding is that YouTube is a breeding ground for internet conspiracy theories and extremist views (FAIR.org, 3/20/18). In fact, it was the platform on which QAnon conspiracy theories first moved from the fringes of 4Chan to the mainstream (New York Times, 10/15/20). A 2021 Anti-Defamation League study found that despite its efforts to remove extremist content from its site, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm still pushes extremist and “alternative” content to users—especially if they’ve already sought out such content—pushing them further down the rabbit hole.

Overwhelmingly corporate

But despite the focus on the site’s independent and sometimes extremist offerings, 83 of the top 100 YouTube news channels—based on a list from SocialBlade, a website that tracks YouTube statistics, as of May 4—are corporate media, meaning owned and funded by large companies or conglomerates. Only six of the 100 top news channels are independently run.

The top channels encompass journalism from around the world, with only 12 based in the United States, and 81 coming from the Global South. Of the 12 US-based channels, all but two are owned—in whole or in large part—by six parent corporations.

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The cable giant Comcast, through its NBCUniversal subsidiary, itself owns four of the 10: NBC (ranked 60th worldwide/8th in the US, with 6.7 million subscribers), Telemundo (ranked 77th/9th, with 5.7 million subscribers), MSNBC (ranked 97th/12th, with 4.9 million subscribers) and a stake in Vox Media (ranked 26th/3rd with 10.5 million subscribers). Disney owns ABC (ranked 19th/2nd with 13 million subscribers) and a stake in Vice (ranked 51st/6th, with 7.7 million subscribers).

Warner Bros. Discovery , through its Turner Broadcasting subsidiary, owns CNN (ranked 15th/1st) with its 13.7 million subscribers.

National Amusements, through Paramount, owns CBS, which produces Inside Edition (ranked 27th/4th with 10.5 million subscribers). The Murdoch family’s Fox Corporation owns Fox News (ranked 35th/5th with 9.4 million subscribers). Televisa Univision, headquartered in Miami and Mexico City, owns Univision, whose news channel Univision Noticias is ranked 58th/7th, with 6.8 million subscribers.

The two independent channels are DramaAlert (ranked 78th in the world/10th in the US, with 5.7 million subscribers) and Cenk Uygur’s the Young Turks (ranked 89th/11th, with 5.2 million subscribers). DramaAlert, founded by online troll Daniel M. Keem, aka Keemstar, covers and creates Internet and entertainment controversies. The Young Turks, hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, is a left-wing news commentary channel.

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Source: Social Blade

A global platform
YouTube is a global—and multilingual—platform, and the three countries most represented in the Top 100 news list mirror the three most common nationalities of its user base.

Half of the 100 most-subscribed YouTube news channels (plus BBC News Hindi, which is based both in Britain and India) are headquartered in India. The US comes in a distant second, with 12 channels on the list (plus Al Jazeera English, which is based in the UK, US and Qatar). Indonesia comes third, with six sources.

These numbers coincide with the top three leading countries based on YouTube audience size (Statista, 1/22). India (the second-most populous country in the world behind China, where YouTube is blocked) has 467 million YouTube users, followed by the United States (the third-most populous country), which has 240 million users, and Indonesia (the fourth-most populous country) with 127 million users.

The site’s top 100 news channels represent 18 different languages. The most frequently spoken, either the sole or a major language on 33 channels, was Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India and the fourth-most common language worldwide. Twenty-nine other channels were entirely or partially in English, including three in Hindi and English, two in Urdu and English, and one in Filipino and English.

Six channels on the top 100 list were in Indonesian, followed by five in Arabic and five in the South Asian language of Tamil. Four channels each were in Spanish, Thai and Urdu, the lingua franca of Pakistan. Other languages represented on the list were Bengali, Filipino, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, Vietnamese and the Indian languages of Malayalam, Marathi, Odia and Telugu.

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Source: Social Blade. Al Jazeera English has headquarters in the US, Britain and Qatar, while BBC Hindi has headquarters in both India and Britain, but these channels were counted as Qatar-based and British-based, respectively, based on their government ownership.

Aaj Tak, part of India’s TV Today Network and the New Delhi–based media conglomerate Living Media group, is the platform’s most popular news channel, with 51 million subscribers. The Modi government–friendly conglomerate is associated with several other YouTube channels on the top 100 list:

*News Tak (ranked 43rd with 8.7 million subscribers)
*Good News Today (ranked 70th with 6 million subscribers)
*India Today (ranked 72nd with 5.9 million subscribers)
*Bharat Tak (ranked 75th with 5.8 million subscribers)
*Crime Tak (ranked 80th with 5.7 million subscribers)
*UP Tak (ranked 79th with 5.7 million subscribers)
*Aaj Tak HD (ranked 90th with 5.2 million subscribers).

All together, Living Media‘s top YouTube channels have nearly 94 million subscribers.

Seventy-three of the 88 non-US-based channels on the list are owned by corporations. Two are independent: National Dastak (ranked 73rd with 5.9 million subscribers), an online-only alternative outlet that focuses on marginalized sections of India, and Raffy Tulfo in Action (ranked 5th with 23 million subscribers), a Filipino broadcast journalist whose program focuses on abuses of power against laborers and ordinary citizens.

Six channels were government-funded, or were the platforms of government figures (such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who ranks 27th on the list with 11 million subscribers.) Two channels were affiliates of the Qatari government–owned Al Jazeera Media Network. Five channels’ affiliations were undetermined.

Misinformation and sensationalism

Some channels on the top 100 list are known for misinformation and sensationalism. India’s Aaj Tak, the No. 1 news channel on YouTube, came under fire in 2015 after a leaked video surfaced of a reporter bribing a homeless child to elicit a statement (BuzzFeed, 11/4/15). In 2020, the channel was fined for attributing fabricated tweets to Indian actor Sushant Singh Rajput after his death (New Indian Express, 10/8/20).

The Indian channel Zee News (No. 4, with 25 million subscribers) has published fabricated stories, including claims that an Indian gangster had billions of dollars worth of property seized in the United Arab Emirates (Janta Ka Reporter, 1/5/17). Thairath Online (No. 12, 14 million subscribers) is the video channel of a Thai tabloid that sparked controversy in 2020, when it referred to the Philippines as “the land of the Covid” (Twitter, 8/10/20). Cidade Alerta Record (No. 98, 4.9 million subscribers) is a sensationalist police and crime program aired on Brazilian Record TV. Misinformation spread on Fox has spanned topics including Covid, climate and the 2020 election (FAIR.org, 10/6/20; Poynter, 7/21/21; FAIR.org, 10/26/21).

While YouTube offers the possibility for independent sites to reach a wider audience, its most-subscribed news channels remain largely reflective of the corporate biases of the global media landscape as a whole.

https://fair.org/home/youtubes-biggest- ... ive-views/

This is how 'free speech' works in bourgeois democracy. You are free to say almost anything, but how much it is heard is dependent upon the size of your platform, your megaphone. And in capitalist society these things must be paid for, so the deeper the pockets the louder the voice. Those without deep pockets are effectively drown out. They are not banned or censored, so ya see, you got free speech. Sure, dissident voices are out there, but hardly heard by many, it's a percentage game and as long as most are informed by the owners the status quo is preserved.

Our political system works the same way, one person, one vote, right? But them deep pockets are not part of the equation, like the environment in bourgeois economics. And because money is now speech(it really always was) deep pockets can employ all of the scams elucidated by Edward Bernays, and in this way that one vote becomes a multitude.

This is how the rich rule, by pretending that wealth means nothing in relation to our politics, our rights, when in fact it means everything.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 06, 2022 2:08 pm

‘The Western Firewall is complete’: the CIA’s Vast Modern Anti-Communist Propaganda Effort
MARCH 27, 2021

By Rainer Shea – Mar 23, 2021

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With COVID-19, the coming of the 2020s “Greater Depression,” and the climate catastrophe that’s increasingly afflicting our society with disasters like last month’s Texas blackouts, class conflict in the United States has reached the highly intensified state that was destined when neoliberalism first became implemented. You can’t drive down the living standards of the masses this much without provoking an ever greater series of uprisings, as shown by the unprecedented amount of participants that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests gained.

In this environment of ever-heightening potential for popular revolt, the U.S. ruling class can only stave off revolution by intensively working to sabotage the process towards the formation of a revolutionary force. Everything that the U.S. national security state does is centered around preventing a scenario where the country’s proletariat builds up a vanguard capable of overthrowing and replacing the capitalist state. This is why, in every respect, the disinformation that the state’s propaganda organs put forth ultimately serves to demonize Marxism-Leninism, the revolutionary model that’s already succeeded at putting state power into the hands of the proletariat within numerous countries.

Such is the nature of the ideological battle that the state is going to wage with increasing intensity in the coming years and decades, as class discontent continues to approach boiling point.

Media hoaxes designed to turn the masses against revolutionary socialism
This central goal that the national security state has of preventing Marxism-Leninism’s ideological rise is most apparent in the fabricated stories about China that we’re being inundated with these days. Since 2018, when every major U.S. media outlet uncritically promoted a shoddily sourced claim about how China had interned “one million” Uyghurs, Americans have been constantly bombarded with the same idea: that China is committing a genocide comparable to that of Nazi Germany. The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the last year that this inflammatory propaganda has helped produce is collateral damage in the U.S. empire’s relentless campaign to stir up anti-communist paranoia, American chauvinism, and cold war fever.

As Ajit Singh of The Grayzone has observed about the most recent report that the U.S. media has used to promote the “Uyghur genocide” claim, every part of the scant “evidence” that supposedly supports the narrative comes from sources which are heavily vested in advancing Washington’s imperialist subversion goals. Singh writes about the integrity of this “independent” study from the Newlines Institute:

Newlines’ report relies primarily on the dubious studies of Adrian Zenz, the US government propaganda outlet, Radio Free Asia, and claims made by the US-funded separatist network, the World Uyghur Congress. These three sources comprise more than one-third of the references used to construct the factual basis of the document, with Zenz as the most heavily relied upon source — cited on more than 50 occasions. Many of the remaining references cite the work of members of Newlines Institute’s “Uyghur Scholars Working Group,” of which Zenz is a founding member and which is made up of a small group of academics who collaborate with him and support his conclusions. As The Grayzone has reported, Zenz is a far-right Christian fundamentalist who has said he is “led by God” against China’s government, deplores homosexuality and gender equality, and has taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions.

An equivalent disinformation campaign has been waged against the DPRK, another socialist country whose system of workers’ democracy has much to teach U.S. proletarians who want to take power. If the victims of our electorally dysfunctional corporate oligarchy were to learn how functional and transparent the DPRK’s voting system is, and how effective it’s been at advancing the interests of the Korean proletariat, eagerness to build a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party would explode. But the masses are systematically deprived of this knowledge. They’re fed a demagogic story about how the DPRK is a “monarchy” where Kim Jong Un holds total power, and where the people are frequently tortured and arbitrarily imprisoned. As journalist Tony Cartalucci has written, these claims are entirely lacking in evidence, with all the sources of the abuse claims coming from the North Korean defectors who are paid extravagant sums of money to make up atrocity stories:

The “pattern” Washington Post writer Anna Fifield and many others claim to have spotted is merely a pattern of unverified claims being made by Western media — built upon previously and likewise unverified claims, creating a cartoon-like vilification of a state writers at the New York Times and Washington Post know readers are unfamiliar with. Western media understands their narratives are difficult for the public to question without conducting their own, extensive and time-consuming research. They depend on readers not clicking links — if links are even included — to long UN reports and understanding the paper-thin credibility of such reports when built entirely on “witness testimony.”

The imperialist media also fabricates outlandish claims like men in the DPRK being forced to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un, or like wildly violent public executions taking place within the country. These serve to sow a general sense of confusion surrounding the DPRK, as war propaganda is so often meant to do. An especially absurd example of this happened last year, as explained by journalist Ben Norton:

The “hipster arm of the empire” [VICE NEWS] published an article trumpeting, “A Prominent North Korean Defector is ‘99% Certain’ Kim Jong Un Is Dead.” Its source was a defector trained and funded by the NED. Days before, the US government-funded Daily NK had also praised VICE for producing a slick documentary that effectively amounts to fawning PR for the disinformation outlet, in a perfect circle of propaganda. Then on May 1 — the same day VICE News claimed there was a 99 percent chance Kim was dead — the house of cards came crumbling down, as DPRK state media published photos of the leader cutting a ribbon at a fertilizer plant.

This is a media that’s relentlessly intent on distorting reality when it comes to Washington’s communist rivals. The impacts of these perpetual disinformation campaigns on our society’s political consciousness are predictably noxious.

Fostering a culture where anti-communism is embraced across the entire political spectrum

Despite the indications that the “Uyghur genocide” is the Iraqi WMDs hoax of our time, and the evidence that virtually everything our media says about the DPRK is a lie, the CIA has gotten those within almost every part of the country’s political spectrum to unquestioningly accept these lies as truth. In addition to the bipartisan consensus that these ridiculous reports are credible and that China needs to be sanctioned for “crimes against humanity,” the supposedly left-wing social democrats who seek to make the Democratic Party more progressive are promoting the “China genocide” hoax as well; in line with Bernie Sanders, the leading social democratic publication Jacobin absurdly claimed last year that China’s Uyghurs are “suffering in mass concentration camps.”

Even in supposedly “radical” spaces like the online anarchist community, belief in these lies are widespread, with the anarchist subreddits regularly producing posts like “Debunking Uighur Genocide Denial” and “how do you combat uyghur genocide denial?” More notably, when U.S.-funded reactionaries began carrying out terrorism within Hong Kong two years ago, the anarchist site LibCom took the opportunity to reinforce the “Tiananmen Square Massacre” narrative in an attempt at lending legitimacy to the anti-CPC agenda of the Hong Kong protests. It didn’t matter that the accounts of the “massacre” have been so thoroughly debunked that this word doesn’t even truthfully apply to what happened in the square; attacking China’s government was more important than the truth.

This is the political culture that the CIA has succeeded at creating within the U.S., and within the other imperialist countries that are participating in Washington’s cold war against China. A culture where the world’s largest workers’ democracy is denounced as a genocidal dictatorship, or at least as an oppressive oligarchy, even by many of those who consider themselves leftists. Of course, this culture has long had ideological basis; as Michael Parenti wrote in Left, Right and the “Extreme Moderates” about how the anti-Leninist left has long sided on geopolitical issues:

There is also a more ideologically oriented component of the left composed mostly of Trotskyists, anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, “libertarian socialists” and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion. What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of “Stalinists” whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties. In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals…It wasn’t the leftists or rightists who waged a war against Yugoslavia, with its repeated bombings of civilian populations and its military assistance to ex-Nazi Croatian and Muslim Bosnian separatists. It was that paragon of centrism Bill Clinton and all the centrists and moderate liberals who stood shoulder to shoulder with him and with NATO and the CIA (along with a gaggle of those anarchists and Trotskists I mentioned earlier who convinced themselves that the destruction of the Yugoslavian social democracy was a blow against Stalinist communism).

As is still the case, these anti-Leninist ideological factions within the left aren’t the ones facilitating the war efforts against communist countries, but they are fulfilling an important role in the sabotage of revolutionary energy within the U.S. This is the role of ideologically policing the class struggle so that it doesn’t gain an accurate understanding of geopolitics, and therefore doesn’t oppose the CIA regime change narratives designed to prevent proletarian revolution. If people think China is an equivalent to the Third Reich, they won’t join with the Chinese masses in embracing the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism. The same consequences come from the proliferation of the fabricated reports about the DPRK, or the demagogic media narratives that paint Cuba as undemocratic. As well as the endlessly recycled Cold War-era myths about Stalin and Mao having “killed millions.”

All of these CIA lies are proliferated by rightists, liberals, and anti-Leninist leftists alike, and all of them serve the same goal: to keep the proletariat powerless and demobilized while the capitalist class continues to loot and economically deprive the population. Our hyper-militaristic, neoliberal dystopia is preserved through propagating the belief that the examples of existing socialism are tyrannical, and that the system we live under therefore isn’t worth replacing because it might simply lead to something even worse. As the Marxist writer Andre Vltchek has observed, nihilism is the essence of this worldview:

All this is not just propaganda anymore; it is the true art of indoctrination. It hardly ever misses its target. And even if it fails to convince some strong individuals completely, it always leaves a mark on the psyche of even those who are struggling to be different and ‘independent.’…The most powerful and repulsive weapon, so far, has been constant injections of lies, contradictions, and nihilism. Just look at Hong Kong! Nihilism is deadly. It destroys enthusiasm, and it robs countries of confidence and courage. And that is precisely what the West is trying to achieve: to derail progressive socialist countries from marching forward and prevent nations oppressed by neo-colonialism from dreaming, hoping, resisting.

The arbiters of today’s anti-communist propaganda campaign want to snuff out the revolution before it even begins, to preemptively fill the people’s heads with emotionally charged outrage stories about communist countries so that they’ll refuse to join up with the revolutionary socialists.

The question is, will this campaign succeed?

Tightening the domestic grip of the imperialist thought police

In the face of capitalist collapse and rising class struggle, the bourgeois propagandists have sought to stoke zeal among the established anti-communist ideological groups (the reactionaries, the liberals, the anti-Leninist leftists) while inculcating the less ideologically inclined individuals with a uniform set of false beliefs about socialist countries (“China is committing genocide,” “North Korea is a human rights abuser, etc). It’s an operation to make the U.S. population police itself at a time when our ruling class seeks to impose unprecedented austerity and state control.

The CIA is very conscious of what it’s doing with this tactic. As The Art of War says, “All warfare is based on deception,” and the U.S. national security state’s goal for the coming years and decades is to wage an ever-intensifying internal class war. This will entail importing the approaches towards propaganda and disinformation that the CIA has utilized in imperialist interventions abroad, similarly to how Israeli-style repressive tactics are being normalized among U.S. police forces or to how Pinochet-style extrajudicial imprisonments have been normalized within the War on Terror. In every sense, U.S. imperialism’s means for exerting control around the globe are in the process of being brought home.

In 2016, the U.S. Army War College as much as expressed this in a report, stating that the growing unemployment and natural disasters of the next few decades will result in “class conflict” within the U.S. that must be crushed through domestic military occupations. According to the war college’s report, these invasions of the country’s urban areas will entail not just mass surveillance of the occupied population, heavy censorship potentially to the point where the internet in the occupied zones gets shut off, and warfare tactics that parallel Israel’s approaches towards suppressing Palestinian uprisings, but a careful narrative management campaign. As the report says:

Presenting compelling narratives can enhance legitimacy and authority in the eyes of many stakeholders (such as the urban populations). Understanding the utility and power of digital media, therefore, allows for enormous reach and breadth that can indirectly alter the battlefield. The user-friendliness of mass media and mobile technology allows adversaries to manipulate and garner favorable public opinion and recruit support. For these reasons and more, civilian and military leaders cannot afford to ignore the requirement for compelling narratives…In the final analysis, the battle of narratives and the contradictions of security are likely to be at the forefront, especially as the most likely contingencies will be humanitarian or stabilization operations. Moreover, such operations could even take place within the continental United States, as demonstrated by the Los Angeles riots and the responses to Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy. Presenting a positive image of the military to the American public is indispensable for continued support.

Such is the task that the capitalist state needs to take on: maximize the exposure that the U.S. population has to the propaganda narratives of the imperialist war machine, and make these narratives as emotionally manipulative as possible. Since the 2013 lifting of a law that made it (officially) illegal for the CIA to covertly target American citizens with propaganda, this need for a ubiquitous mind-influencing network within our society has been fulfilled. There’s no longer even the semblance of a check on the internal powers of the U.S. government’s propaganda organs. As journalist Whitney Webb has observed about the consequences of this propaganda free-up:

Since 2013, newsrooms across the country, of both the mainstream and “alternative” variety, have been notably skewed towards the official government narrative, with few outside a handful of independently-funded media outlets bothering to question those narratives’ veracity. While this has long been a reality for the Western media (see John Pilger’s 2011 documentary “The War You Don’t See”), the use of government-approved narratives and sources from government-funded groups have become much more overt than in years past…state-crafted information originally intended for a foreign audience is now being used domestically. [Filmmaker Robbie Martin] noted that this has become particularly common at some “pseudo-alternative” media organizations — i.e., formerly independent media outlets that now enjoy corporate funding. Among these, Martin made the case that VICE News stands out.

And right on schedule with the development of Washington’s geopolitical rivalries, in recent years VICE has been amplifying disinformation about the DPRK. Disinformation that perfectly fits the vein of strategic deceptive tactics in wartime; convincing the population that the leader of a socialist workers’ state has died is a good way to try to demoralize and confuse the members of the revolutionary socialist movement. I won’t be surprised if the CIA puts out an equivalent story when the U.S. is undergoing the internal class revolt that the war college predicts.

These disinformation campaigns of the country’s near-future are going to be as calculated and strategically targeted as the CIA’s operations to elect pro-U.S. Latin American candidates through fabricated media stories, or the foreign U.S. propaganda network’s efforts to confuse Asia’s population through alarming made-up news reports during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. They seek to sabotage the fighters in the class war, making us unable to garner sufficient support for the revolutionary socialist cause or operate based on an objective picture of our conditions.

The extreme censorship measures and online shutdowns outlined in the war college’s report are some parts of this. Another part is the micro-targeting approach of the country’s cybersecurity system, which keeps growing more sophisticated as AI and quantum computing get perfected. As journalist Raul Diego wrote earlier this month, the U.S. national security state aims to establish an all-encompassing online apparatus where people’s thoughts can be steered away from disfavored opinions:

People’s search habits, social media post history, and even retail transaction details are among the many kinds of data up for sale in our cybernetic Elysian Fields, to which advertisers, hackers and political operatives can all gain access in order to sell us a coffee maker, extort money from us, or ostensibly change our vote in an election. The solution, according to cyber-defense researchers, is the development of regulatory frameworks that can parse through the content and designate its appropriateness for mass consumption. A “Ministry of Truth,” so to speak, that can mitigate any disruptions to the status quo that might seep through in the Wild West of social media platforms.

As Vltchek concluded last year, “The Western firewall is complete.” In preparation for the coming class war, the U.S. national security state has constructed a labyrinth of propagandistic indoctrination, fabricated stories designed to confuse, and censorship against foreign media and anti-imperialist journalists. And to preemptively retain support for the U.S. military during their planned domestic occupations, they’ve utilized the tactic of projection, accusing Washington’s rivals of all the genocidal and anti-democratic actions which Washington itself has perpetrated. Such is the environment that revolutionary socialists in the heart of the imperialist beast must overcome.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-western- ... da-effort/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jun 10, 2022 2:11 pm

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Paul Mason’s covert intelligence-linked plot to destroy The Grayzone exposed
By Max Blumenthal (Posted Jun 09, 2022)

Originally published: The Grayzone on June 7, 2022 by Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal (more by The Grayzone) |

A former Trotskyist and BBC journeyman, journalist Paul Mason has made a career as the establishment’s favorite gatekeeper of the UK left. Since the Russian military incursion into Ukraine, he has cemented his position as one of Britain’s most vocal “left” cheerleaders for Western military intervention.

While leading a “U.K. left” delegation to Kiev and a demonstrationthrough to streets of London in support of NATO military escalation against Russia, Mason has accordingly used his platform to assail journalists, academics, Labour party members and private citizens who oppose shipping piles of advanced weaponry to Ukraine.

In a series of recent columns, Mason called for the state-enforced suppression of facts and perspectives he considers overly sympathetic to the Kremlin, and demanded “state action” against members of the media that oppose the NATO line on Ukraine. He placed The Grayzone at the top of his fantasy censorship target list.

Mason has since announced a run for parliament on the Labour ticket to wage his crusade against “disinformation” from inside the House of Commons.

The Grayzone, meanwhile, has learned through anonymously leaked emails and documents that Mason has been engaged in a malicious secret campaign that aims to enlist the British state and “friendly” intelligence cut-outs to undermine, censor and even criminalize antiwar dissenters.

In one leaked email, Mason thundered for the “relentless deplatforming” of The Grayzone and the creation of “a kind of permanent rebuttal operation” to discredit it.

In another, the celebrity journalist declared that “the far left rogue academics is who I’m after,” then rants that he is motivated by fear of an emergent “left anti imperialist identity” which “will be attractive because liberalism doesn’t know how to counter it.”

Mason is joined in his covert crusade by Amil Khan, the founder of a shadowy intelligence contractor called Valent Projects. In the cache of leaked emails, Khan proposed to Mason the initiation of a “clever John Oliver style stunt that makes [The Grayzone] a laughing stock,” as well as a “full nuclear legal to squeeze them financially.”

The Grayzone has previously revealed Khan’s extensive involvement in the Syrian dirty war, during which he provided public relations guidance to jihadist groups, trained anti-government activists in communication strategies, and secretly oversaw supposed citizen journalist collectives backed by foreign governments. His goal was to flood international media with pro-opposition propaganda, destabilize the government of Bashar Assad, and ready the ground for Western regime change.

This ethically dubious work was conducted for a variety of intelligence-adjacent British Foreign Office contractors, such as ARK, a firm founded by probable MI6 operative Alistair Harris, and IncoStrat, which has been plausibly accused of producing propaganda for the blood-stained UK and Saudi-backed insurgents.

After leaving the Middle East, Khan reinvented himself as an expert in countering “disinformation”, and has since charged a number of blue chip clients a premium for his dubious services. As this outlet reported, the same techniques of manipulation and information warfare that Khan honed in Syria were turned against Western citizens when he oversaw a British quasi-state funded astroturf YouTube project designed to counter public skepticism of Covid-related restrictions.

Khan’s email communications with Mason illustrate the grudge he has harbored since The Grayzone exposed his devious exploits. In the missives, he descends into self-delusion, insisting this outlet’s factual, objective reporting was, in fact, state-sponsored retaliation for his crusading work “opposing military dictators and kleptocrats.”

Together, Khan and Mason plotted to assemble a coalition of anti-Grayzone actors, including the U.S. and UK government-funded “open source” outlet Bellingcat, which Mason revealingly described as a channel for “intel service input by proxy.” Khan proposed convening the de facto Victims of Grayzone Memorial Foundation at an in-person summit to “come up with a plan that addresses [The Grayzone’s] objectives and vulnerabilities.”

At one point, he even reached out across the Atlantic for advice from Nina Jankowicz, the disgraced former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board.

It is uncertain how Mason and Khan became acquainted, but their mutual coincidence of needs, motives and vendettas is obvious. The public interest in releasing the pair’s private communications is also abundantly clear. If their planned criminalization of The Grayzone for publishing facts and opinions they abhor is successful, it will have dire ramifications for any and all journalists and independent media institutions seeking to challenge the status quo.

When approached by The Grayzone, Paul Mason declined to comment on the incriminating correspondence with Khan, and claimed to have informed local police that “an attempt was made” to hack his email account. While dismissing the leaked content as “likely to be edited, distorted or fake,” he went on to pledge he would “not cease to identify and rebut Russian disinformation operations masquerading as journalism.”

In other words, Mason implied he plans to carry on with the very activity exposed in the leaked emails.

On April 30 this year, Paul Mason emailed Amil Khan, making clear he was “keen to help” de-platform The Grayzone.

He attached a bizarrely constructed “dynamic map of the ‘left’ pro-Putin infosphere” that resembled a spider’s web, with a mess of arrows linking the names of members of parliament, media outlets, activists, causes, and British minority communities.

The barely coherent, racially-tinged chart connected the Russian government, Russian state broadcaster RT, the People’s Republic of China, and Beijing-based tech millionaire-financier Roy Singham to the “Muslim Community,” “Young Networked Left” and “Black Community” through a series of leftist outfits and UK Labour figures. No evidence was provided to support Mason’s linkages.

At the center of Mason’s chart (see below) is Jeremy Corbyn. When Corbyn served as Labour leader, Mason plotted against him in private while simultaneously posing as one of his most ardent public supporters. He also sought to influence Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in a pro-war direction.

The implication behind Mason’s Nixonian enemies chart was clear: Russia and China have weaponized the British left to corrupt key Labour constituencies–therefore the left must be neutralized.

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Mason suggested to Khan that he enlist the help of “pro traffic analysts to map” how these “different echo chambers interact, where their material begins–and work out who might [emphasis added] be pulling the strings.”

He nonetheless seemed certain about the dark forces animating The Grayzone, bombastically charging that its “attacks” on Khan and others are “fed by Russian and Chinese intel,” including hacking, “electronic warfare” and human intelligence.

Mason compared this process to Bellingcat receiving “a steady stream of intel from Western agencies.” The U.S. and UK government-funded outlet Bellingcat has frequently been accused of laundering CIA and MI6 dirt, a charge which the operatives behind it aggressively repudiate. However, Khan–a long-time advocate and associate of the outlet–did not once challenge Mason’s repeated characterization of the supposed citizen journalist collective as a clearing house for friendly spy agencies.

Underlining the sensitivity of the pair’s malicious plans for The Grayzone, Mason stressed the need for their work to be conducted via “white label organisations operating with firm infosec–Signal/ProtonMail, clean phones.”

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Khan was clearly amenable to his suggestions. Five days later, he outlined two options for taking down The Grayzone: “some sort of clever John Oliver style stunt that makes them a laughing stock”–referencing a sting operation targeting academic Paul McKeigue conducted by the dubious, intelligence-linked Commission for International Justice and Accountability back in 2021–“or full nuclear legal to squeeze them financially.”

Mason was enthused by the latter prospect, submitting that it should be “combined with relentless deplatforming,” including cutting off The Grayzone from donation sources such as PayPal, in the manner ofConsortium News and MintPress, and setting up “a kind of permanent rebuttal operation.”

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Khan agreed, proposing the pair “get a few people together who are looking at/been target [sic] by this together and do a centre of gravity analysis,” pooling “what we’ve all learnt about how they operate” in order to “come up with a plan that addresses their objectives and vulnerabilities, not just their arguments.”

Mason responded by launching into a conspiratorial aside asserting that the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) post-February 16, 2022 reports showing a dramatic Ukrainian military escalation against pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region represented “manipulated facts.”

He then proposed “creating a dynamic reference catalogue debunking all [The Grayzone’s] allegetions[sic] and ‘facts,’” pitching the initiative as an alternative to direct engagement or “toe to toe” debate.

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“Keen” to move on the project, Mason suggested several information warriors to join them; Emma Briant, an academic researching disinformation; Chloe Hadjimatheou, the British intelligence-linked BBC journalist who produced a multi-part podcast series smearing critics of the NATO-backed Syrian White Helmets organization as Kremlin stooges and fascists; and Bellingcat, which he said could provide “intel service input by proxy.”

Khan said he was “happy” to host a secret meeting of these individuals at Valent Projects’ London offices.

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After Mason proposed inviting a representative of the UK Foreign Office to the anti-Grayzone meet and greet, the Valent Projects chief reached out to a friend at the National Security Council’s Communications Directorate, a Whitehall unit “tasked with hybrid threats.”

His Directorate source said the British government would be averse to sending a representative to the gathering, “as it could jeopardise outcomes later.” Nonetheless, they advocated convening people “targeted” by The Grayzone, to collate evidence that could be submitted to OFCOM, Britain’s communications regulator, and/or Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the name of both a government department and parliamentary committee, “as part of a formal complaint.”

They imagined that this process could somehow trigger an investigation into The Grayzone’s “funding and activities,” leading the government to “get properly involved.”

Khan added that his pal suggested also approaching Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action for the initiative.The Grayzone has previously exposed these media charities as having participated in covert British state-funded efforts to “weaken the Russian state’s influence.”

Khan said he would also be in touch with the Foreign Office’s newly-founded psychological warfare unit, the Government Information Cell.

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Mason’s reaction was mixed. While hailing the prospect of triggering an official government investigation into The Grayzone as “a good idea,” he seemed crestfallen the plan did not include securing material from British intelligence on who funds the site, and “what their ultimate deliverables are on behalf of the ppl [people] their work benefits.”

“An investigation into them would lead to what? Deplatforming? Anyway that’s progress,” he concluded.

Khan reassured Mason that OFCOM and DCMS could task “other bits of government to get that intel; and the findings will automatically enter the system”–meaning The Grayzone and its contributors could end up slapped with “Russian state affiliated media” labels on social media, leading to algorithmic discrimination and potential shadow banning, among other penalties.

“I think/hope there’s potential to go further [emphasis added]. It’s too easy for them to flip deplatforming with ‘the system is scared of us’. We need to look at their influence/legitimacy with audiences,” Khan stated.

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Yet Khan is likely to be extremely disappointed if he and Mason follow through on their dream of submitting formal complaints about The Grayzone to OFCOM and/or DCMS.

For one, OFCOM’s remit extends to domestic broadcast media, such as TV, radio, and streaming platforms. In other words, it does not and cannot scrutinize or sanction online content, let alone that of U.S. websites. On the same grounds, it is unclear what jurisdiction DCMS has to investigate The Grayzone. Further, no British government department, except perhaps for MI6, could possibly be tasked with unearthing damaging “intel” on this publication or its staff.

It is therefore stunning that veteran mainstream media pros like Mason and Khan were unaware of such an obvious, fatal flaw in their scheme. More importantly, The Grayzone does not and never will receive funding or direction of any kind from the Chinese or Russian governments, or any other foreign state or connected entity.

Khan and Mason plan pro-Ukraine propaganda shop backed by NATO states “through cutouts”
Mason and Khan’s brazen attempt to de-platform and financially cripple an independent media outlet on the slanderous, fictional pretext it is actually a hostile foreign information operation is especially perverse given that other leaked emails in The Grayzone’s possession reveal that Khan and Mason apparently plan to construct a hostile foreign information operation of their own.

Dubbed by Khan “International Information Brigade,” the proposed project would represent an astroturfed civil society organization which serves as “the major, forward leaning player in the information war.” While publicly operating as an NGO, the Brigade would be funded by Western states “through cutouts,” and closely intertwined with intelligence services.

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Mason responded that Khan’s plan for a state-backed propaganda operation presented as a grassroots civil society initiative was a “good idea,” and proposed “immediate translation of Kyiv independent stuff,” noting that “the European Young Socialists are doing this already and have raised funds.”

The Young European Socialists is a social democrat-oriented youth organization sponsored by the European Union. And the Kyiv Independent is a key propaganda organ of the Ukrainian government which has received financial support from the Canadian government and European Union.

Khan drafts invite to secret anti-Grayzone summit
Whether Khan and Mason’s bold plans for an anti-Grayzone summit have been put into action remains unclear. However, by May 12, Khan had drafted an invitation for prospective members to attend the initial brainstorming session. In his note, he conjured up a vast and fearsome nexus of “pro-Russian trolls” destroying anyone in the Kremlin’s way, at the center of which rests The Grayzone Death Star.

“We are getting in touch because, like us, you have also been targeted by a network of pro-Russian trolls…This network revolves around the outlet known as Grayzone and includes a dozen or so individuals who use online intimidation, bullying and harassment to promote pro-Kremlin talking points,” Khan wrote. “Social media platforms and governments have identified the [sic] RT, Sputnik etc as Russian state affiliated outlets and taken action accordingly. Grayzone, however has avoided scrutiny.”

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Mason suggested a minor amendment to “avoid libel risk”: revising the passage referring to The Grayzone as “in fact an information operation of a dictatorship.” He felt this should be softened to The Grayzone “present themselves as journalists when their modus operandi looks more like [an] information operation–whether voluntary or co-ordinated–of a dictatorship.”

Khan agreed to the alteration and proposed more summit guests. They included the BBC’s “first specialist disinformation and social media reporter,” Marianna Spring, who recently smeared several British academics for scrutinizing Western claims relating to the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. He also suggested including former BBC and Jewish Chronicle editor Martin Bright, who he said may be “heading up a group looking at the legal side of this sort of thing.”

For further participants in the anti-Grayzone summit, Khan referred Mason to Paul Hilder, the Ted Talk-ing, Labourite co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy-funded OpenDemocracy.net and Avaaz, which has lobbied for NATO military interventions in both Libya and Syria.

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Consulting Nina Jankowicz on paranoid scheme against Consortium News

On April 8, Mason emailed Khan to express alarm about a piece in Consortium News, the independent news platform founded by the late Robert Parry in 1995, questioning the Western narrative of the Bucha massacre. “Who’s behind Consortium News?”, the subject header read.

Khan responded that he had consulted Nina Jankowicz, former chief of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, who resigned her post in disgrace just three weeks after being appointed due to intense criticism of her professional history, bizarre behavior, and record of censorious statements.

According to Khan, Jankowicz saw Consortium News as a case of “useful idiots rather than funding,” presumably a reference to Kremlin financial support. Khan was by contrast “not so sure,” suggesting “the gap” in its output “between 2005 and 2011” was “of a lot of interest.”

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Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, expressed bewilderment at the purported disinformation expert’s observations, and outrage at the defamatory implication that the site might be in receipt of illicit Russian funding.

“There was never any ‘gap’ in our publication,” Lauria told The Grayzone.

Our founder, Bob Parry, simply switched to WordPress in 2011 and transferred some of the most important articles from the old system. There were thousands of articles so he couldn’t possibly transfer all of them, it had to be done manually. The articles that weren’t transferred can be found on Wayback Machine.

Indeed, anyone perusing Consortium’s archive of “most important” past pieces can see that numerous articles from the period cited by Khan have been avowedly republished, with their original publication dates clearly stated. This raises the question of whether such conspiratorial thinking influenced PayPal’s decision to terminate Consortium’s account in May 2022.

Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to infer Khan has been enmeshed in a wilderness of mirrors for so long as a psy-ops professional that he has lost his grip on reality, and has begun to project his own mephitic perspectives and malicious motives onto actually independent, alternative voices.

Similarly, Mason’s descent into paranoia about The Grayzone’s factual reporting may represent the terminal stage of a career that has taken him from the margins of Trotskyite activism to the molten core of the British establishment, still posing as an authentic radical to wage war on the UK left.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 14, 2022 2:15 pm

PROPAGANDA, RECRUITMENT AND HEGEMONY IN 'TOP GUN: MAVERICK'
Jun 13, 2022 , 3:00 p.m.

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'Top Gun: Maverick' proposes a return to classic American militarist cinema in a time of "Cold War" (Photo: Paramount Pictures)

Top Gun: Maverick is a sequel that appears 36 years after the first installment, "coinciding" with the rise of another Cold War and the geopolitical inflection that is taking place right now, due to the attacks of the United States and NATO against Russia, using Ukraine as a proxy state .

That apparently fresh, youthful first eighties film, full of testosterone, aerial combat weapons and even acclaimed for homoerotic ( Tarantino dixit ), was responsible, according to some sources, for a 500% increase in recruitment for US Navy pilots.

Without wanting to spoiler, the new installment of Top Gun is presented as a cult of nostalgia for old-fashioned cinema. But more than that, it is also a cult of the audiovisual language and semiotics of the military propagandist discourse of the first installment.

The hyper-stereotypical central character of a brave and "correct" man reappears, an individualized presentation of American unilateralism, this time ushering in a new generation of young people in the face of a diffuse, technologically threatening and "invisible" (as he is not named) enemy. explicitly in the film), which "threatens the peace and security" of Americans and the Western world.

As if it were a stylized reissue of the Reagan era, Top Gun: Maverick evokes American "military superiority" and the contradictions of the present time as a result of technological transition, since this is the era, according to the film, of end of fighter pilots and we enter the era of drones and joystick operators executing real operations as if it were a video game. Pure military romanticism.

According to "Pete Maverick", the denominator that will make the difference will continue to be the courage and daring of men (and also women, let's not forget inclusion) brave with the gallantry to fight against "the forces of evil".

AN EXERCISE IN PUBLIC RELATIONS AND PROPAGANDA

Top Gun gets its name from a real high school academy for US Navy ensign pilots. As in the first installment, the production had the support of the Navy, who lent their planes and pilots for the recordings.

Tom Cruise (actor/producer) made sure he and the cast went through a lengthy boot camp to get on planes and not throw up on the camera or pass out too many times on set. The Navy leased its F-18 jets for more than $11,000 an hour, and production costed about $152 million.

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Not everything is American war propaganda, it is also European. At the British premiere Tom Cruise poses next to a Eurofighter Typhoon, an EU flag plane (Photo: Paramount Pictures)

In theory, making a movie with real fighter planes could be more expensive than one with computer-generated planes. The costs of Top Gun: Maverick are comparatively lower than those of other productions with high use of digital images. Every film in the Avengers saga exceeds 350 million costs and Pirates of the Caribbean: Sailing in mysterious waters (which did not have the most expensive cast in cinema) cost 385 million dollars. Without a doubt, the new installment of Top Gun had externalized costs, that is, not assumed or reflected by the film production company.

With little CGI (computer generated imagery), a lot of "realism" and a lot of detail on military equipment in close-ups, it is worth adding that the military authorities made sure to approve the film's script before contributing to its realization.

Although the film was recorded for 2018 and its presentation was prolonged by the pandemic, its effect today is clearly increased by the geopolitical and war climate. However, even before it began, there was already concern in the US Navy to increase recruitment.

The situation had not improved, until now. Around the same time Top Gun: Maverick opened , recruiting numbers were "below target," Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday told members of the Senate House Armed Services Committee during a hearing for the fiscal year 2023 defense budget request.

"I think we face a big challenge this year, " Gilday told lawmakers this month. "I think we'll get our numbers on the active force this year, but by a slim margin." Will the war in Ukraine and Top Gun have something to do with it?

The effort to recruit and keep pilots has been an ongoing challenge, officials said. The pilot service in 2018 fell short of 1,242 aviator positions and was losing top pilots to lucrative airline careers, according to reports . The Navy at the time predicted that it would take until 2023 to close the gap.

The contradictions of the US weapons system now have a point of convergence. The same US military industry, which proposes the use of drones and their remote management by human operators or through artificial intelligence systems applied to the military field, is the same industry that provides the US government with the infrastructure of services to the more than 5,000 700 fighter planes, multi-purpose planes and others, which remain in service and demand old-fashioned pilots.

Being the pilot deficit a reality, it is evident that the processes of propaganda and public relations to increase recruitment are necessary. Even more so in the most expensive industrial-military complex in the world.

To speak only of this year, Biden requested 753 billion dollars of global spending on defense and national security for fiscal year 2022, but it was finally increased to 782 billion, without referring to the total amount that "military aid" will provide to Ukraine in the remainder of the year.

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Top Gun Maverick is full of narrative details focused on American military glory, albeit with a touch of nostalgia (Photo: Paramount Pictures)

US military hegemony is a reality, but its triumphant epic and the supposed rectitude of its motives is a farce. These dimensions must be understood differently, according to the magnitude of the events.

The first Top Gun encouraged beliefs in the ideology of military superiority in a United States defeated and demoralized shortly before in Vietnam. Top Gun: Maverick appears after the humiliating withdrawal and defeat of the United States after its occupation of Afghanistan for 20 long years.

According to the movie (spoiler alert), Pete Maverick is the only American pilot to have shot down enemy pilots in "head-to-head" air combat since Vietnam. In reality and officially, no such thing has happened. Modern air combat no longer has fighter aces beating each other, nor is there any record of it in the last 40 years.

In fiction, Pete Maverick managed to defeat from an F-14 Tomcat (designed in the 1970s) to a group of fifth-generation Russian Sukhoi Su-57s. Something inconceivable from a military approach. But in reality, the Su-57s test their weapons in real operations in Ukraine, they are widely deployed because they are completely stealthy and, on the other hand, the current Russian hypersonic missiles that accurately attack Ukrainian military targets are and will be unbeatable. by any antiaircraft system for the next 15 or 20 years.

Propaganda is also a weapon to change perceptions of reality and thereby fabricate the supposed US operational-technological superiority. Precisely, in the latter, the inflection that opens the way to the end of the military hegemony of that country is now taking place.

Top Gun: Maverick is a versatile propaganda film and one of its various reasons for being is to justify the high cost of its military apparatus to the public in that country. But it is also, without pretending to be and despite its romanticism, an evocation of a superiority in decline, obsolete and less and less credible, like Maverick himself in person.

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Intellectual prostitutes call critics foreign agents, useful idiots
By Yves Engler (Posted Jun 14, 2022)

Originally published: Yves Engler Blog on June 12, 2022 (more by Yves Engler Blog)

A military funded academic, working at a school launched by Condoleezza Rice, claims leftist and anti-war journalists engage in Russian disinformation. His report doesn’t provide any evidence or refute anyone’s argument, but the legacy media laps it up.

On Thursday the University of Calgary School of Public Policy released “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. With the exception of a blog by Dimitri Lascaris that dismantled its absurd ideological premises, coverage of the report was almost entirely uncritical. Headlines included: “Canada target of Russian disinformation, with tweets linked to foreign powers” (Globe and Mail), “Why is Canada the target of a Russian disinformation campaign?” (CJAD Montréal) and “Canada is target of Russian disinformation, with millions of tweets linked to Kremlin” (City NewsToronto). The report’s lead author Jean-Christophe Boucher was a guest on multiple TV and radio outlets, labeling those who question the role of NATO expansion, the far Right and 2014 coup against an elected president in understanding the war in Ukraine “useful idiots” of Vladimir Putin.

Boucher and his co-researchers claim to have mapped over six million tweets in Canada about the conflict in Ukraine. They claim over a quarter of the tweets fall into five categories they label “pro-Russian narratives”. But they don’t even attempt to justify the five categories. Instead, they simply list the most prominent commentators and political figures promoting these ideas under the rubric of “Top Russian-influenced Accounts”. The list includes leftist journalists Aaron Maté, Benjamin Norton, Max Blumenthal, Richard Medhurst and John Pilger. But no evidence is offered to connect these individuals to Russia.

While “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media” reveals little, it has served its political purpose. It will further insulate Canadian officials from criticism of their policies by suggesting anyone questioning Ottawa’s Ukraine/NATO policies are part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Boucher is a product of the Canadian military’s vast publicly financed ideological apparatus, which I detail in A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. He has been a fellow at the military and arms industry funded Canadian Global Affairs Institute and Dalhousie Centre for the Study of Security and Development. He advocates theories amenable to the military’s interests, including “strategic retrenchment: falling back on the people you can really trust”, which is a sophisticated way of saying Canada should deepen its alliance with the US empire. His academic profile says Boucher “is a co-lead of the Canadian Network on Information and Security, funded by the Department of National Defence” while his Canadian Global Affairs Institute bio notes that “he is currently responsible for more than $2.4M of funding from the Department of National Defence (DND) to study information operations.”

The military put up the money to establish the Canadian Network on Information and Security (CANIS) as a joint project between the University of Calgary’s Public Policy Institute and Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies. A 2020-21 DND report labels CANIS among three initiatives “launched to tackle DND/CAF’s most pressing challenges.”

The University of Calgary School of Public Policy is essentially a right-wing think tank housed at a university, according to Donald Gutstein, author of two books on Canadian think tanks. It was set up in 2008 with $4 million from leading oil and gas lawyer James Palmer and launched at a $500-a-plate gala that included a keynote speech by George W. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The supporters of militarism would like us to believe that anyone criticizing Canada and NATO’s policies on Ukraine is a Russian agent or a useful idiot. But people being paid to promote opinions favourable to arms makers, the US empire and powerful individuals should have little credibility when it comes to criticizing the motivation of others.

On Monday’s Canadian Foreign Policy Hour (6.13.2022) I will discuss “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media” with Canadian born journalist Aaron Maté, who is listed number two in its “Top Russian-influenced Accounts”. We will also discuss the US/UK/Canada’s role in sabotaging negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 16, 2022 1:46 pm

THE CORPORATE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE OF AMERICAN PROPAGANDA
Jun 15, 2022 , 11:28 a.m.

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"House of hegemony", illustration by Liu Rui (Photo: Global Times)

Any Western citizen, but especially the American, who sees an opinion piece or a TV program in which someone from a group of experts on Ukraine, Afghanistan or Iran, for example, participates, is faced with the possibility of reading or listening to a person who has received money from defense contractors.

This has become more common since Russia's special military operation in Ukraine began, with cable news networks routinely calling on military officials-turned-consultants to offer analysis and help the American public understand the crisis. These analysts often use valuable television time to call for greater US involvement and bolder moves that could escalate tensions between two nuclear-armed superpowers.

The Ukraine crisis and the potential for further conflict have been a gold mine (like time on TV) for defense contractors, sending stocks soaring and prompting sharp increases in defense spending.

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TITLETEXT:
Total performance of the largest US arms companies so far in 2022
CREDITS:
Seeking Alpha

For the $54 billion in mostly military " aid " the United States has committed to Ukraine in the last three months, the $40 billion approved by Congress in May alone garnered overwhelming support (368 vs. 57 in the House, 86 vs. 11 in the Senate).

According to The Hill , it is more than a billion dollars that the United States had already spent last year, in the midst of the pandemic crisis, to arm Ukrainian soldiers with modern weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missiles, made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies, the latter also manufactures the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

INVITED BUT ALSO INVOLVED

In an analysis of three weeks of news coverage following the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan last year, the Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) portal found that 20 of 22 featured guests on Sunday network shows had ties to the US military-industrial complex.

The case that, due to its ecosystem, draws the attention of the mainstream thinker Robert Wright is that of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). It is a think-tank directed and attended by "quite extremist hawks", according to the author.

The ISW has become the go-to think tank for the elite media for information and analysis, to the point that they are quoted almost daily by a reporter from the New York Times , the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal , in the first six days of June were cited in at least ten articles that appeared in one of those outlets. This has turned the climate of US opinion on Ukraine into a favorable haven for defense contractors, unlike the war against Iraq where there were plenty of marches in opposition to the invasion.

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TITLETEXT:
The climate of US opinion on the invasion of Iraq was more adverse than the current one regarding the shipment of weapons (which is direct participation) to Ukraine, which has been favorable due to a closed circuit between the media, think-tanks and contractors
CREDITS:
File, Archive

It has raised funding from various corners of the arms industry: General Dynamics, Raytheon, lesser-known defense contractors, and big companies, like General Motors, that aren't known as defense contractors but get contracts from the Pentagon.

They are part of the cast:

*Kimberly Kagan: President and founder of the ISW, she is a military historian.
*Frederick Kagan, is also a neoconservative military historian and works for ISW. Married to Kimberly and closely related to General David Petraeus, commander of the invasion of Afghanistan.
*Robert Kagan, brother of Frederick, who along with Bill Kristol (who is on the ISW board of directors), founded the Project for a New American Century which was instrumental in convincing George W. Bush to invade Iraq.
*Victoria Nuland, a State Department official who publicly supported Ukraine's Maidan Revolution in 2014 and thus the coup against Viktor Yanukovych.
*Bruce P. Jackson , an executive at Lockheed Martin, the company that financed the Project for a New American Century and organizer of the American Committee to Expand NATO, this strategy has generated a lot of money for the largest defense contractor , Lockheed Martin, and other manufacturers of arms during the last quarter century.

In addition to encouraging the delivery of weapons to the neo-Nazi factions sponsored by the Ukrainian government, the ISW constantly positions the information from kyiv and ignores that from Moscow, which is why it finds more Ukrainian than Russian hopes in war actions.

REVOLVING DOORS AND NATURALIZATION OF PROPAGANDA

Wright affirms that war propaganda disguised as political analysis is "subtle" and does not seem to be wrong, the point is that it also permeates every aspect of Western media culture, as has been seen with movies and TV.

Its most effective attribute has been the eradication of any ideological cast by naturalizing certain values, such as supremacism. If each "analyst" speaks from "normality", assuming his opinion as typical or standard, any other opinion that moves away from it will be extremist, therefore, it would qualify to be stigmatized.

A simple but efficient tactic is that of the media not mentioning the links of these experts with defense contractors and their financial interest in promoting US military intervention.

Another attribute is the narrative that starts from the idea that, since the media and analysts are multiple, they are diverse. Wright himself falls into this trap by stating throughout the essay that there is a diversity of news networks without taking into account the cartelization of those who finance their infrastructure and content.

So far in 2022, even more so since the start of the Ukraine crisis, shares in companies like Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have surged and President Biden signed into law a spending package allocating a record $782 billion. dollars to the defense, almost 30 billion above its initial request.

Jim Naureckas, editor of FAIR, told the Lever portal : "The people who have the most interest in influencing the direction of coverage are the gun manufacturers" adding that "they have the most direct financial involvement in the way we cover the issues of war and peace. Unfortunately, they are interested in more war and less peace."

ELOQUENT PHRASES (AND THEIR AUTHORS)

*" And if the United States can train and equip the Ukrainians and, I think, engage in a second Charlie Wilson War , basically the sequel to the movie and the book, which is arming and training a determined force that will shoot down Russian planes from the sky, open those tanks with can openers, like the Javelins, and kill Russians, which is what our team is doing, I think this is a great opportunity to hit Putin very hard.

Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff at the Pentagon and CIA under President Barack Obama, recurring guest on MSNBC and NBC during their coverage of the Ukraine crisis, founder and managing director of advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies working for Raytheon . This companymanufactures Javelin anti-tank missiles with Lockheed Martin.
*"What we need to do is give the Ukrainians the ability to create a no-fly zone ... More Stingers, more missiles that can go higher than Stingers."

Admiral James Stavridis, a member of the advisory board of Beacon Global Strategies, vice president of global affairs, and managing director of the Carlyle Group , who has a history of investing in the defense and homeland security markets. Stinger missiles are manufactured by Raytheon , a client of Beacon Global Strategies.
*" This battle is far from over, as long as we can continue to resupply the Ukrainians' weapons."

Retired Army General Wesley Clark, a veteran with a lucrative career in defense business and leader of Wesley K. Clark & ​​Associates, who says he "leverages his experience, his relationships, and his extensive reputation and international experience in the fields of energy , alternative energy, corporate and national security, logistics, aerospace and defense, and investment banking."
What they say and sell is intimately related: it is total war.

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Values ​​and transparency
June 16, 15:13

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News of freedom of speech in Europe.

Values ​​and transparency

Vera Yurova , Deputy Head of the European Commission for Values ​​and Transparency, called on European countries to block media that pose a threat to national security without waiting for EU decisions. The European Commission urged EU countries to block media that "threat national security"
Yurova cited the example of the Baltic countries, which banned certain Russian TV channels based on their own assessments.
“Now in the context of the information war, all EU countries must constantly assess whether specific media pose a threat to national security . This should be decided not by the EU, but by the member countries, ”TASS quotes her.


https://russian.rt.com/world/news/10154 ... blokirovka - zinc

Such are the "European values" now. Everything is subordinated to the single goal of clearing the information space for relaying the only correct point of view. Other - represents a threat to national security. Since the EU is too bureaucratic and slow, they are already quite openly lobbying for increased press censorship through the state institutions of individual members, using as an example the Baltic limitrophes dependent on the USA. Where, using the example of Fedorov, they show that for a different point of view it is quite possible to go to prison and be tortured.
One of the undoubted advantages of the ongoing war is the complete self-exposure of the so-called "European values". Now for the dumb ones.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 18, 2022 2:55 pm

The Mainstream Worldview Is Self-Evidently Bullshit: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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They’ve lied about every war, and they’ve openly acknowledged lying about this very war, but you’re a Kremlin agent if you say they’re lying to us about this war.



The mainstream worldview is self-evidently bullshit. If our media and education systems were telling us the truth about the world and our “democratic” systems actually worked, our society would be arranged to serve the interests of the many rather than an elite few.

You can tell the mainstream worldview is bullshit just by looking at its fruits. We’re killing our biosphere to serve an economic system that’s creating greater and greater inequality while wars rage and nuclear brinkmanship threatens to wipe us all out and corruption rules the earth.

The world is as it is because the way the majority of people in the most influential nations think, act and vote is being continuously manipulated by the powerful, for the powerful. The mainstream worldview is just a giant bundle of power-serving lies and manipulations.




The thing about the entirely predictable admission by Biden officials that sanctions are hurting ordinary Russians a lot more than they’re hurting the Kremlin is that the US empire is fine with that. The US empire doesn’t use sanctions to punish leaders, it uses them to foment unrest and hopefully spark a coup or civil war.

During an interview in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo effectively admitted that this is what the US empire uses sanctions for: not to influence the behavior of the government, but to coerce the people into ousting their government. State Department documents from 1960 show the US government discussing this exact same strategy regarding economic warfare against Cuba. This is a longstanding practice.



Western liberal democracy is when corporations and bankers place all blame on the government, the government places all blame on the electorate, and the electorate absorbs all the consequences of the corporations, bankers and government without ever even getting a vote on any of the major decisions those entities make.

Ordinary citizens are assigned full responsibility for their social and financial struggles and their privacy rights are being eaten away. Powerful people are never held accountable for their immensely destructive decisions and they are protected by a wall of government secrecy.

Accountability and transparency should have a directly proportional relationship with power: the more power you have the more consequences you face for your actions, and the less privacy you’re entitled to. In our society it’s literally the exact opposite. It’s completely backwards.



Just as western plutocrats and politicians want all the power and none of the responsibility, so too do their mouthpieces in the mainstream media. Highlighting their errors is harassment, criticizing them on social media is cyberbullying, calling out their sleaziness is Trumpian.

These people are broadly despised yet believe they’re doing a fantastic job. They insulate themselves in tightly cloistered self-validating echo chambers, so a member of the common riff raff tweeting harsh truths at them is experienced as an unexpected assault.

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This class participates in an ongoing propaganda operation to manufacture consent for the status quo, and without them the world would look completely different. Their voices are orders of magnitude more powerful than ordinary people’s, yet they want no responsibility for this role.



If I had the Thanos glove I wouldn’t use it to impose my personal ideology on the world, I’d use it to make all the secrets of the powerful visible to everyone and democratize information sharing so people could decide for themselves what course of action to take in response. All government secrets, all corporate and financial secrets, all the secrets of media institutions, would all be immediately visible and placed in front of everyone’s eyes. Then everyone gets a device with access to a global public forum to talk about everything they’ve learned.

I’d just let people see everything and then choose their own adventure. Maybe they’d choose to create the kind of egalitarian society I’d like to see, maybe they’d create something else. It’s up to them. All I did was end the subversion of their personal and collective sovereignty.



In all the controversy about whether the US should be associating itself with a murderous tyrannical regime like Saudi Arabia please don’t forget that the US is far more murderous and tyrannical than Saudi Arabia by an extremely massive margin.

“Oh noes, Biden should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like MBS!”

Bitch, MBS should be embarrassed to be seen with a tyrant like Joe Biden.



Conservatives will happily make kids pledge allegiance to flag and republic every day at school and sit in class learning about how they live in the greatest country on earth, then they’ll freak out about LGBT issues because “the children are being indoctrinated.”



Mainstream western proponents of “democratic socialism” never call for an end to imperialism because they are fully aware that their version of “socialism” is entirely dependent upon imperialist domination and exploitation.



People who believe humanity can make positive changes toward health and harmony tend to be people who’ve made such changes in their own lives. People who believe human nature is selfish and destructive tend to be selfish and destructive people. We’re just describing ourselves. We’re describing the insides of our own reality tunnels and then dressing it up as some grand knowledge about objective reality.

Really none of us know humanity’s fate, because our thinking about human potential and human nature is filtered through our personal experience of humanity from the inside. It is a mystery, and we can just let it be a mystery.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/06/17 ... ve-matrix/

'Red' added.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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