The New York Times continues to selectively promote news that fits the Establishment narrative. The NYT portrays the nine-year sentence of the Russian “opposition leader” Aleksei Navalny to a high-security prison as a travesty of justice. Was it unjust? If so, justice must be demanded. What I can comment on is a factual inaccuracy by the NYT: Navalny is not the opposition leader. His party has zero seats in the State Duma. The opposition party is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 57 seats. Navalny’s party, Russia of the Future, has zero seats. Russia of the Future remains unregistered as a political party. This is an unassailable point for the NYT given that democracy in the US is such that the Communist Party and Communism has been outlawed since the days of president Dwight Eisenhower.

A clearcut travesty of justice is the case of the political prisoner Julian Assange. He is imprisoned for having carried out his job as a publisher at WikiLeaks: informing the public by publishing facts. WikiLeaks has a publication record which under normal circumstances would make the NYT green with envy: WikiLeaks is “perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.” But the NYT is not about accuracy in publication.

WikiLeak’s perfect publication record includes revealing the war crimes of the United States; for this, the US Establishment placed a target on Assange’s back.

NYT, which once collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish stories, notes that Navalny — who was tried and convicted — has been held in captivity for more than a year.

Assange — who has been tried and convicted of breach of bail stemming from fraudulent Swedish charges; since Sweden refused to guarantee non-extradition to the US, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, subsequent events have borne out Assange’s fear — has been under one form of incarceration or another since January 2011.

In 2017, Navalny was found guilty at a retrial for embezzlement and given a five-year suspended prison sentence. He was later imprisoned for breaching the terms of his probation. In his latest trial, he was again found guilty of having embezzled people’s money. The NYT, however, paints the verdict as a move to extend Navalny’s time in prison.

Assange has only been found guilty of the relatively minor violation of breaching bail. Nonetheless, the period of his detention began with bogus charges of rape and sexual molestation cooked up by Swedish authorities. It is not difficult to join the dots and arrive at the logical conclusion that were it not for the initial fraudulent allegations against him, Assange would never have been placed into detention in the first place, and he would not be facing extradition to the US where he could sit in prison for as much as 175 years — for doing something for which he should be saluted by humanity: exposing war crimes.

Assange represents another nail in the coffin of the worthlessness of the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that has previously been conferred upon war criminals and other miscreants.

NYT is not focused on the miscarriage of justice against Assange even though the abuse of justice in Assange’s case puts its own “journalists” at risk of persecution should they reveal grave crimes of state.

Russia, the US-designated ennemi du jour, is an easy target for the NYT. Therefore, even though Navalny is a convicted criminal, he is deemed worthy of support by the NYT. Navalny is an enemy of an enemy, that plus his animus against Russian president Vladimir Putin makes him a friend for the US Establishment. Given this cozy arrangement, the NYT is free to cast aspersions on the Russian judge, Margarita Kotova, insinuating that her recent promotion is linked with the judicial finding against Navalny.

Emma Arbuthnot, who presided over Assange’s extradition case from late 2017 until mid-2019 was accused of a conflict of interest since her husband is “a former Conservative defense minister with extensive links to the British military and intelligence community exposed by WikiLeaks.” She did not recuse herself, and the legal Establishment in Britain did not have her removed from the case. In one ruling, Arbuthnot showed her true colors by dismissing a United Nations working group’s assessment that Assange was being arbitrarily detained.

Arbuthnot’s subordinate, judge Vanessa Baraitser, took over the Assange case and ruled that he should not be extradited for reasons of mental harm. However, she also stated that she believed Assange to be guilty, providing an opening for an American appeal, which the US won.

Assange’s appeal of that appeal was rejected. It seems that the appellate court accepted the Biden administration’s pledge not to confine Assange under the austerest conditions reserved for high-security prisoners and, should he be convicted, to allow him to serve his sentence in his native Australia.

Returning to Navalny, the NYT asserts there is “substantial evidence” that the Russian government was responsible for poisoning him in August 2020. And if one follows the link embedded for the “substantial evidence,” one comes to another NYT article wherein it is stated “Navalny’s revelations about his poisoning — not all of which have been independently verified.” The source of the “substantial evidence” is Navalny. In fact, there appears nothing at all that is compelling or substantial. But an investigation to determine the authenticity of Navalny’s claims would be in order.

On the other hand, there is verifiable evidence that the assassination and kidnapping of Assange was discussed at the highest levels of the CIA.

The NYT does not point out the discrediting of the rape allegations against Assange. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, destroyed the rape allegations against Assange and accused the authorities of psychological torture against the WikiLeaks publisher.

Expressing sympathy for Navalny, the NYT rued that he might be “moved to a higher-security prison farther from Moscow, making it harder for his lawyers and family to visit him.”

Meanwhile Assange, unaccused of any violent offense, is being held in the maximum security Belmarsh prison in England — about 15,000 km away from his birthplace in Australia.

The NYT mentions concerns for the life of Navalny. This concern is ostensibly missing for Assange’s incarceration in Belmarsh. Given that the British judge found imprisonment a mental health danger for Assange, it is a stark contradiction to keep him in prison where his mental health would remain at risk while awaiting the justice system’s outcome. It speaks clearly to the travesty of justice Assange has endured.

The Ripple Effect

The NYT’s shoddy journalism emerges again and again. Only recently it had to admit it had suppressed the story of what’s on the laptop of president Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. What was initially dismissed as Russian disinformation turned out to be Russiagate disinformation.

It shines a spotlight on who overwhelmingly provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Grotesquely, the mother of all rogue nations, the US, led/cajoled its subservient Canadian, European, Japanese, South Korean, among other accomplices to sanction Russia (unilateral sanctions have been denounced by independent UN human rights experts who declared the right to development “an inalienable human right”) while the instigator goes unsanctioned.

Navalny deserves justice as much as any other person on the planet. If an injustice has been meted out to Navalny, then that must be corrected. The present thesis examines who the NYT deems worthy or unworthy of propping up. NYT’s “opposition leader” in Russia is without any party members in the Russian State Duma. Navalny compares in many respects to the hapless Juan Guaidó, a wannabe president of Venezuela, who the US backs and recognizes as president of Venezuela. To bring about a government amenable to American dictates in Venezuela, president Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat and sanctioned seven Venezuelan officials in 2015. Human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, who is highly critical of NYT coverage of Venezuela, estimated that at least 100,000 Venezuelans having died because of US sanctions. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs contend that the US sanctions “fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory.”

One victim who has not been found worthy of mention in the NYT is 16-year-old Palestinian Nader Rayan who was gunned down by Israeli border police troops. Israel’s Haaretz had the gumption to publish a piece describing the corpse of Nader Rayan:

strewn with deep, bleeding bullet wounds, his flesh is bare, his brain is spilling out, his head and face are perforated. Border Police troops shot him with pathological madness, in a rage, savagely, without restraint. His father counted 12 bullet wounds in his son’s body, all of them deep, large, oozing blood. Head, chest, stomach, back, legs and arms: There’s not a part of his son’s body without a large, gaping hole in it.

Nothing can justify this repeated shooting of a teenager who was running for his life, certainly not once he was hit and lay wounded on the road. Not even if the initial Border Police account, which for some reason was magically altered the following week – that the youth or his friend shot at the troops – is correct. Nothing can justify such unhinged shooting at a youth.

One can glean an understanding for NYT’s concern or lack of concern for humanity by comparing how it feted and eulogized genocidaire and former US secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright who blithely agreed with half a million Iraqi kids serving as sacrificial lambs for US policy objectives.

Russians, according to the NYT, have responded with insouciance to Navalny’s predicament.

Conversely, Julian Assange has garnered worldwide attention and support. Despite this, he is being subjected to a slow-motion assassination. As long as Assange draws air, there is still time for a tidal wave of humanity to drown out the injustice. It may seem unfair that one political prisoner, Julian Assange, has so much of progressivists’ attention focused on his release, but Assange is crucial in making known the crimes of state and revealing the plight of other people wrongfully imprisoned or unjustly targeted by the state.

How to stop the extradition of Assange? For instance, shutting down any airport that would seek to fly Assange to the US. Protestors in Hong Kong managed to shut down their airport, so it can be done. If enough people would surround Belmarsh prison preventing entry or exit, such a mass movement signal would be a signal. The trucker convoy with its supporters disrupted Ottawa and borders in Canada for weeks, and it had an effect because soon afterwards many provincial governments relented on the mandates. So it can be done. The protests caused the Canadian government to resort to an extremely draconian Emergencies Act and siphon people’s bank accounts. Forcing the state to turn to repressive measures is contradictorily a victory for protestors. The battle for justice will not and must not be over until Assange and all others falsely imprisoned are released. Conscience demands it.

dissidentvoice.org

Every year the European Parliament awards a so-called “Sakharov Freedom of Conscience Prize.” The official story goes that the winner is selected for his or her contribution to the promotion of human rights. But a quick review of recent laureates belies that unctuous claim. Last year’s winner was an abstraction called the “opposition to Lukashenko,” and the prize has also been awarded to equally nebulous entities such as “Uyghur dissidents in China,” and the “Venezuelan opposition.” In the same tradition, “Afghan women and girls,” left a month ago to their own devices by the prize-givers, have also been nominated for recognition this year. Clearly the high sounding prize, brazenly manipulating the prestige of an iconic Russian scientist who just happens to be dead and unable to disown it, is a political propaganda tool.

The salience of the latter point is compellingly illustrated by this year’s principal nominees, the Bolivian coup regime “acting president” Jeannine Añez and the infamous Russian prevaricator Alexey Navalny.

The in-your-face European Parliament human rights prize nomination of señora Añez, for the notable accomplishment of serving as provisional head of state in an illegal coup regime which deposed the legitimately elected President, should be enough to give the whole game away, shouldn’t it? Fabled European values and the rule of law prattle apparently do not apply to countries where the majority indigenous population insists on having as its leader someone with whom it shares cultural and (why not say it openly?) ethnic affinity. Especially when that leader’s obnoxious policies (think of Mosadegh and Nasser for a moment) audaciously aim to preserve the country natural wealth and use it for the benefit of its citizens, and contrary to the designs of foreign industrial magnates. Mrs. Añez, who looks as Bolivian as apple pie, was fully cognizant of these circumstances when she accepted to front for her foreign sponsors and assume leadership of the coup regime they were installing, by agreeing to serve as the illegal President. By doing so, she violated the human rights of the vast majority of the Bolivian people who supported, as they still do, Evo Morales, the person she seditiously drove out of elected office. The potential that such a usurper might be awarded a “freedom of conscience” prize bearing the name of Andrei Sakharov, a man who was not perfect but stood for things quite opposite to the base political skulduggery to which this wretched, foolish, and power hungry woman had lent herself to, is nothing less than shocking. It is indeed an act of depravity and cynicism that only the amoral leadership of present-day Europe might have been capable of.

The other leading contender, Alexey Navalny, is cut from the same cloth. However, unlike Mrs. Añez, while having enjoyed his intoxicating fifteen minutes of fame, he had never been invested even temporarily with the glory of presiding over a broken and dismembered Russia, as he and his directors had dreamt. Like Mrs. Añez, Navalny is facing the music in a way neither of them had contemplated or was prepared for.

It is conceivable that had the proposal of collaboration been made to them after instead of before Afghanistan, they would have analysed it more soberly and even sceptically. That is merely a hypothetical possibility, of course, since such greedy and ambitious characters are not noted for their steep learning curve. But for all its undeniable unpleasantness, prison is nevertheless a great place to focus the mind. Both Mrs. Añez and her Russian colleague now have an opportunity to ponder not just their fate but also the subtle message underlying the spectacular honours that might soon be heaped on one or both of them.

That message is stark and simple, and it is that they are washed out. They will never seize the prize which they avidly sought, the opportunity to rule and plunder their countries as foreign surrogates, because their usefulness has finally run its course. The most that they can aspire to now is a consolation prize of sorts, the fading Empire’s European puppets’ act of condescension reserved for third or fourth echelon collaborators.

Oh, will they and their ilk ever learn? Most likely not.

The hallmark of a shoddy, pulp fiction story is it quickly fades from memory. It’s a bit like lots of other made-for-fast-consumption experiences: fast-food, trashy news, infotainment, drugs, or indeed propaganda stunts. It’s sold brashly with gaudy packaging but the intended substance is lacking. Hence, in a short period, the experience and memory vanish leaving a disappointing void.

The alleged poisoning of Russian blogger and political gadfly Alexei Navalny is a case in point. It was one year ago that he dramatically fell ill while on a flight from Siberia. He was rushed to hospital where the Russian doctors stabilized his condition. The medics found nothing extraneous in his body fluids and suggested he was suffering from a medical reaction. Two days later, Navalny was permitted by the Russian government to be flown on a private airplane for treatment in Germany. Within days, the Berlin authorities were claiming he had been poisoned with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok. (After body samples had been analyzed at a Bundeswehr military laboratory!)

This was the same nerve poison that was allegedly used by Kremlin assassins against Russian traitor-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March 2018. Remember the Western media kerfuffle over that drama, the diplomatic expulsions and sanctions? Where have all the expressions of concern about that obscure incident gone? Indeed, where are the Skripals now? The British authorities like a conjuror refuse to disclose the whereabouts of the disappeared. The silence is beyond bizarre.

As with the Skripal case, there then followed a torrent of accusations from Western governments and media claiming that Navalny had likewise been the victim of an assassination plot by the Kremlin. There were grave demands for Moscow to conduct a criminal investigation into the alleged poisoning of Navalny.

One year on, Western governments and media have stopped playing to the gallery with unsubstantiated claims about Navalny. Even the blogger himself, who is now serving three years in a Russian jail for financial corruption, has stopped talking about it. Last year, while allegedly convalescing in Germany for five months in violation of his probation terms for an earlier suspended conviction by a Russian court, Navalny made sensational claims that President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered his assassination. Western media indulged and amplified the slander. Then he returned to Russia in January, whereupon the Russian prison authorities detained him and converted his suspended sentence into jail time. Rightly so, too.

Laughably, the prisoner has been free to give interviews to prominent Western media outlets. So much for him being “persecuted in a penal colony”!

Last week, he wrote an opinion piece for the British Guardian and this week gave an interview to the New York Times. Strangely, however, he barely mentions the purported assassination plot that Putin had allegedly ordered. That shows, inadvertently, that not even Navalny has any conviction in peddling the preposterous story.

The contradiction and absurdities in the Navalny saga, as with the Skripal “prequel”, are legion. A detailed account of official communications from the Russian foreign ministry demonstrates how the German authorities have refused to follow basic standards of informational exchange with Moscow on the provenance of claims made by Navalny that have been amplified by Berlin and other Western governments. That refusal, like the British one over the Skripal affair, is a shocking dereliction of diplomatic standards and due process.

As with so many other anti-Russian tropes – from election meddling to cyber attacks – there is an absolute dearth of evidence provided to back up accusations. The accusations are recklessly repeated over and over and thereby take on the appearance of being established facts (The Big Lie technique of Josef Goebbels no less). When in fact the claims are always fiction.

Navalny is a pathetically deluded person. There is no doubt he is an asset for Western intelligence agencies assigned to subvert Russia from within with his scripted media antics. He has a minimal following among Russia’s population and is more famous outside the country than inside simply because his anti-corruption fables and exploits are lionized and projected by Western media who are themselves orchestrated by intelligence services.

His delusions are so rampant that he and his Western supporters don’t even spot the silly discrepancies in their narrative. In his New York Times interview this week, the “upbeat” Navalny describes prison conditions in Russia as “psychological violence”. On one hand, he says there is no hard labor as in Soviet gulags, then he compares his situation as being akin to a “Chinese labor camp”. He says “reading and writing are prohibited” and that inmates are forced to watch hours and hours of state television every day, such as reruns of old war movies (Oh, how torturous!). So, in that case, how does our poor “tortured dissident” find the time to “read memoirs of world leaders”, keep up his social media posts, and give lengthy commentaries and interviews to Western media?

As informed commentator John Helmer points out, there is indisputable evidence that Navalny’s erratic psychological behavior and his dramatic hospital episode last year were caused not by a military nerve agent but by his own addiction to anti-depressant drugs. His abuse of mood-altering substances would fit with his demanding function as a Western propaganda puppet who has to continually produce theatrics and stunts for his handlers.

A year after a ridiculous psychological operation conducted on the international public by Western governments, intelligence services, media and their Russian asset, hardly anybody remembers the story or the details of the plot. That’s because it was always forgettable fiction in the first place.

But, ironically, there is a valuable conclusion, albeit unintentional. What is important to discern and remember is how Western governments are guilty of peddling anti-Russian propaganda dressed up as “facts” and “news”. The Western public in particular needs to grasp that because the “authors” are trying to destroy international relations to the point of inciting military conflict with Russia. And that’s the real story behind their throwaway pulp fictions which you will never read about in Western-controlled, corporate media.

In the case of Saddam Hussein, it was by lying about “WMD” and about Saddam’s being behind Al Qaeda.

In the case of Muammar Qaddafi, it was by lying about Qaddafi’s being hated (instead of supported) by most Libyans.

In the case of Bashar al-Assad, it was by lying about Assad’s being hated (instead of supported) by most Syrians.

In the case of Xi Jinping, it is by lying about Xi’s being a dictator.

In the case of Vladimir Putin, it is by lying about Putin’s being a dictator.

However, all such allegations, except the case against Saddam, were irrelevant under international law, and provided no legal basis for an invasion or sanctions by any foreign country. (Furthermore, all of those allegations were lies.) Regarding Iraq, the U.S. regime lied to allege the presence of a nuclear-bomb program there, and this allegation pertained to America’s own national security; so, that allegation concerning Iraq would have been a possible justification to invade, if it hadn’t been a lie. (Truthfulness is always a requirement under international law.) But in the other instances, no danger to America’s national security was even being alleged. The U.S. regime alleged that the foreign leaders it wanted to overthrow were ‘violating the human rights of the people’ there, but the U.S. Government routinely violates the human rights of its own population and imprisons a higher percentage of them than any other country — including all of the ones it criticizes — does; so, any such allegation by the U.S. regime is perhaps even worse than a pot calling the kettle black, because this particular “pot” is blacker than any of the others. What foreign countries say about ‘human rights’ in any other country provides no grounds in international law for the accusing country to invade that country. If a given national leader should be replaced, that regime-change shouldn’t be foreign-imposed (for example, America and its allies — the champions of foreign regime-change operations — should have nothing to do with it), but instead it should be done only by patriots within that given nation — and not assisted (much less instigated) by the CIA, MI6, or etc., since that would make it be imperialism. A basic principle of international law is that law within any nation doesn’t fall within the purview of international law: it’s simply not an international matter. International law is supposed to concern only international relations — no internal (domestic) matters (unless the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council specify there to be an exception — such as if they rule that a genocide is being perpetrated within a given nation). Other countries (such as the rulers of America) might not like the ruler of a given nation, but this doesn’t give those foreigners any right to perpetrate regime-change there, such as the U.S. and its allies routinely do (and have done ever since 1948).

Consequently: the way that America and its allies do sanctions, coups, invasions, and other regime-change operations, is by deceiving their own publics — it is always being done by means of propaganda, lying to their own people. To this extent, any imperialistic nation is actually a regime, not a democracy, because imperialism is always, and even intrinsically, based upon lies, which the given nation’s rulers use in order to fool their own citizenry, so that those ‘citizens’ are actually those rulers’ “subjects,” not authentically citizens, of that actual dictatorship. (And then they lie by referring to their subjects as ‘citizens’, instead of as “subjects,” so as to be able to continue fooling them throughout the future, to continue the myth of their own nation’s being a ‘democracy’.)

The foreign-imposed regime-change operations are always based upon lying. It’s the basic tool of any dictatorship. And the public never learns that they’ve been suckered by their rulers.

That’s why it happens again and again, and the public fall for it again and again. The public never learn from their own government’s lying; they just fall for it, again and again. They trust their Government, ‘their’ ‘democracy’, and its ‘news’-media (actually propaganda-media).

In the world today, what country doesn’t call itself a “democracy”? Do any democracies actually exist? A nation that engages in imperialism is certainly a dictatorship — its government lies routinely, to its own subjects. That cannot be a democracy. A ‘democracy’ that’s built upon lies is a dictatorship. Democracy can be built only upon the public’s being truthfully informed regarding every issue that’s of governmental importance. Does such a nation exist? Where does it exist?

The biggest lying is done about international matters. Unfortunately, most people don’t care about international matters, but only about domestic (or intranational) matters. So, it’s easy for dictators who rule an imperialistic regime to fool their public — i.e., to enslave them mentally. It’s what the public there are actually accustomed to.

——

Let’s take, as an example, the case by the American regime against Russia’s leader, Putin. America and its allies allege that Alexei Navalny, who has long aspired to replace Putin as Russia’s leader, is in prison in Russia because Navalny is so popular there that in a fair-and-square election, Navalny would beat Putin.

The dominant public image of Navalny in the United States and in its allied countries is that of his being an anti-corruption campaigner in a very corrupt Russia, and his being Russia’s most-popular opponent against Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and therefore blocked by Putin from running against Putin, and who has even been poisoned by Putin, but — amazingly — survived that poisoning by Putin, and is therefore now being imprisoned by Putin, so as to prevent Navalny from being able to run against Putin in a free and fair democratic election in Russia.

However, the dominant public image of the Russian Alexei Navalny inside Russia is that of his being a CIA-MI6 asset who is a racist-fascist traitor who would sell-out his country for anything so long as he could become its leader, just like Benedict Arnold was in early U.S. history, when the then U.S. Vice President Arnold worked with the intelligence services of Britain’s King George III in order to become America’s leader so as to restore the United States to British control. (That ploy, by Arnold, failed, of course.)

Typical of the view regarding Navalny that’s popular in the U.S. and in its allied countries is a news-report from Reuters on May 6th, titled “Defiant but cornered: Jailed Kremlin critic Navalny’s movement is on the ropes”. It opens:

He has been poisoned, jailed and his close aides are either being prosecuted or have fled abroad. His anti-Kremlin opposition movement is now also likely to soon be outlawed as extremist.

Yet Alexei Navalny and his supporters continue to work on ways to remain a thorn in President Vladimir Putin’s side, even as one of his most important financial backers says the movement in its current form is finished and will take time to rebound.

In the eyes of the Kremlin, the only half-meaningful political weapon the Navalny camp has left is its campaign for tactical, or what it calls “smart” voting against the ruling United Russia party in a parliamentary election in September, according to three people close to the Russian authorities.

Navalny’s supporters are set to be barred from that election via a court case, due to unfold later this month, and planned legislation unveiled on the parliamentary website on Tuesday that would ban “extremists” from running for office.

A court, meeting in secret, is considering a request from Moscow prosecutors to have Navalny’s network designated “extremist” for allegedly plotting a revolution, state media have reported. Russia’s financial monitoring agency has already added the network to a list on its website of groups involved in “terrorism and extremism”.

In response, Navalny’s movement has redoubled its call for sympathisers to vote for other opposition parties in September, however unpalatable they may consider them.

Typical of the view of Navalny that is popular inside Russia itself are the following:

An RT news-report on 1 February 2021 headlined “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal”. Back in 2012, Russia’s equivalent of America’s FBI had a hidden camera in position filming, and recording, Navalny’s top aide trying to persuade a person he thought to be an MI6 (UK’s CIA) agent that MI6 should annually donate tens of millions of dollars to Navalny’s organization because doing this would provide billions of dollars of benefit to UK corporations if Navalny would then succeed and become Russia’s leader.

Navalny is also known in Russia as a far-right ethnic supremacist. Here is a video that he posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches. Later, he decided that demagoguing against Russia’s “corruption” was far likelier to win him the backing of the U.S and its allies than demagoguing against Russia’s Muslims would. This was when U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media began presenting him as the ‘democratic’ alternative to Vladimir Putin, who has always been vastly more favorably viewed by Russians than Navalny has been. On 5 September 2020, right before the latest Russian Presidential election, the internationally respected Levada polling organization in Russia reported that the top choice of Russians to lead the country was Putin at 56%, the second-from-top choice was Zhirinovsky at 5%, and Alexey Navalny (shown there as Алексей Навальный), was the third-from-top choice, at 2%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. There were many polls and Navalny was never any serious contender for Russia’s Presidency. The U.S. regime lies as it usually does (at least about international matters).

That’s what Russians know about Navalny. And, of course, it’s very different from what the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries know (or, at least, believe) about him.

Here is some recent propaganda that’s published by U.S.-and-allied regimes about Navalny:

On May 22nd, Japan Times ran a Reuters report, “How Russia’s new gulag tries to break convicts like Alexei Navalny”.

On May 23rd, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Russia’s Navalny Fights to Stay in Public Eye in Putin Standoff”.

On May 4th, the Washington Post columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza headlined “Russia just took a big step back toward the Soviet Union”, and said: “Last week, for the first time since the Soviet era, the Kremlin officially classified opposition to its rule as a criminal offense. … Moscow prosecutors suspended the activities of the nationwide organization of Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most prominent opponent. Navalny is currently incarcerated in a prison camp after surviving a state-sponsored assassination attempt last year.”

Navalny, though he actually is favorably viewed by only around 2% of Russians (as indicated in polls there), is widely publicized in U.S.-and-allied media as having instead the highest support by the Russian people of anyone who might challenge Vladimir Putin for Russia’s leadership. It’s a lie, and always has been. Other politicians have far higher polled support in Russia. For example, a Russian poll conducted in the days following Alexey Navalny’s alleged novichok poisoning showed the following level of support for him then, if a Russian election for President would be held at that time: Vladimir Putin 56%, Vladimir Zhirinkovsky 5%. Alexei Navalny 2%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. There were many polls and Navalny was never any serious contender for Russia’s Presidency. The U.S. regime lies as it usually does (at least about international matters).

To say that Navalny has enough public supporters for him to have become elected as Russia’s President is like alleging that the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke had enough public supporters for him to have become elected as America’s President.

But some people in America still think that Saddam Hussein was hiding WMD in 2002.

This is how America does regime-change propaganda, every time: lies.

These lies come from the regime that spends around half of all of the entire world’s military spending, and the regime that imprisons the world’s highest percentage of its subjects (or ‘citizens’). It’s the ‘land of the free’, and exports its ‘freedom and democracy’ everywhere.

And that’s how America does regime-change operations: by sheer lies.

Like all imperialism throughout history, it’s based on lies — propaganda. And, like in all imperialistic regimes throughout history, their public believe these lies, every time, time after time. They don’t learn the truth, because they’re never taught the truth. (Dissenters are suppressed, not hired. In any dictatorship, the financial incentives support the liars, not the truth-tellers.)

theduran.com

After three weeks allegedly on a hunger strike, the Western-lionized Russian blogger Alexei Navalny has thrown the towel in. The decisive factor was the Russian authorities refusing to kowtow to a Western orchestrated drama.

Another factor is that Navalny is a conman and stooge of Western intelligence services. To carry out a real hunger strike is perhaps one of the most traumatic, mentally excruciating feats of self-sacrifice. To witness yourself wasting away to death must summon the deepest convictions of righteousness.

I remember living through the Irish Republican hunger strike 40 years ago which resulted in the death of 10 prisoners in a British state prison. The first one of those men to die was Bobby Sands who at the age of 27 passed away in a coma on May 5 after 66 days of refusing food. It was one of the grimmest periods in the 30-year conflict with Britain that ravaged Ireland.

Few political prisoners undertake hunger strike, and fewer still see it through to the horrendous end. Only those dedicated to a righteous cause could ever contemplate overcoming the gravest challenge.

That’s why everything about Navalny’s supposed hunger strike reeks of a sham aided and abetted by the fawning Western corporate media. The apparent collaboration in this drama also indicates the relationship of a stooge orchestrated by Western state intelligence.

When the 44-year-old convicted embezzler declared that he was going on a death-fast on March 31, the Western media kept pace with sensational headlines detailing his supposed declining health. We were told about pains, aches, and numbness, “torture”, “imminent death” and so on. Even though the Russian prison authorities released video footage of Navalny swaggering around his shared dormitory remonstrating with a guard over some petty issue.

The British state-owned BBC reported that prison authorities were using dastardly tricks such as putting savory meals beside Navalny’s bed. The BBC never gave any such concerned coverage to Bobby Sands and his Republican comrades who were abused inhumanely by British prison guards. Indeed, the British media portrayed the then Margaret Thatcher government as justified in its treatment of “Irish terrorists”.

Instead of the grim fate supposedly facing Navalny, the Western media reported his social media statements with an air of jocularity. “My friends would laugh if they saw me now walking around like a skeleton,” said Navalny in one of his Instagram posts. How is it that a purportedly persecuted prisoner has the liberty to use social media and generate Western headlines? The inappropriate humor also betrays a lack of credibility in his supposed journey of death.

All the while, the Russian authorities were monitoring Navalny’s health and maintaining that his condition was “satisfactory”.

U.S. President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were reportedly impressing on Russian President Vladimir Putin their concern over Navalny. Again, such high-profile intervention is a reflection of the political orchestration going on. It is so disproportionate to the reality that it is an absurd giveaway of scripted drama.

It soon became clear, however, that the Russian state would not be bullied by psycho-drama. Its laws and sovereign affairs are not open for hypocritical Western lecturing.

Navalny was arrested on January 17 after spending five months in Germany in flagrant violation of his parole terms for a suspended jail sentence over a fraud conviction in 2014. While in Germany, Navalny cooked up the outlandish drama that he had been poisoned with a military nerve weapon on the direct orders of Putin. No evidence has ever been provided to support his claims but the Western media and governments have endorsed the narrative as if gospel truth.

The indulgence and fawning must have given Navalny a sense of impunity, reinforcing his megalomania and attention-seeking. He was therefore shocked when he was arrested on returning to Russia from Germany and again when the Russian federal authorities ordered in February that his suspended sentence be converted to two-and-half-years behind bars.

While in prison, Navalny began demanding the “right” to have his private doctors visit him over alleged leg numbness and back pain. How’s that for arrogance!

One wonders how the BBC would have reported it if Irish Republican prisoners were making such a demand from the British state.

In any case, Russian authorities faced down the intense Western media campaign aiming to make a hero out of the “starving” Navalny. Prison doctors maintained that he was being adequately cared for. One may speculate that the Russian authorities spotted the fake drama from an early stage. You can’t pull off a harrowing hunger strike without an iron will – which Navalny and his handlers do not have because their cause is a fake pretext for destabilizing Russia’s internal politics and undermining the government.

Realizing that the battle of wills – and shills – was not going to be won, the next necessary ploy was to create an off-ramp for Navalny in order to avoid farcical embarrassment.

His personal doctors started “warning” on April 18 through obliging Western media headlines that Navalny “could die any day” due to his deteriorating condition. That was after 19 days of supposed hunger strike. Strangely, Navalny’s doctors were somehow able to give such a dire prognosis without actually examining him personally.

Then on April 23, the BBC and other Western media outlets ran headlines such as: ‘Navalny urged to end hunger strike’.

Within hours, the convicted conman declared that he was coming off his alleged fast to the death.

So, there you have it. The end of another drama in which the Western-lionized hero cheats death twice in only a matter of months. First, from alleged poisoning with a deadly nerve agent, and secondly, from an anguish-filled three-week hunger strike (at least according to Western media).

At this point, Navalny’s intel scriptwriters and Western media are the only ones going hungry.

The dictatorship manages information both by deceiving the public to believe what the regime itself knows to be actually false (such as that Saddam Hussein might be only six months away from having an atomic bomb), and also by removing the lie from its ‘news’-media as soon as that lie has served its purpose and becomes no longer useful to the regime. The lie goes down the memory-hole, instead of being focused upon and analyzed by the regime’s media, and the reason why they disappear the lie is that after a certain amount of time, the percentage of the public who know that it was false has risen high enough so that any further mention of that false allegation (remember ‘Saddam’s WMD’? Does anybody today even discuss that lie?) would serve only to increase the percentage of the public who will figure out that it hadn’t been a mistake, but instead had been an intentional deception of the public — a lie. The media hide their lies, instead of report on them. The lie is not investigated; it’s always a corpse that was buried without any autopsy, and that will always stay buried, by the regime.

A classic example of this was George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s bold lie on 7 September 2002 that the IAEA had come out with “the new report” which found that Saddam Hussein was “six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon,” and two days later the IAEA sent out to the media a notice saying that it had issued no new report at all and nothing after 1998 when they had found that Iraq had destroyed its entire nuclear-weapons-development capability. All of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, except a brief UPI news-report that was published in no major news-media, ignored the IAEA’s statement, and so the IAEA repeated the denial, and all of the ‘news’-media yet again ignored instead of published the fact — the fact that both Bush and Blair had lied through their teeth and invented that new IAEA report. 7 September 2002 was the date when the U.S. and allied regimes started their saying, as U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said the following day, on September 8th, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” And, then, on September 12th, U.S. President Bush delivered his speech at the UN saying that they must authorize action so that “a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.” If he had been referring there to the U.S.-and-allied regime — the U.S. empire — then that would have been a true statement, but instead it was the puny Iraqi regime — and its leader — that were overthrown and murdered, by Bush and Blair, on their fraudulent basis, and they were not tried and executed for having perpetrated “Aggressive War” (as it’s called in international law) — invading a foreign country only on lies — the same legal violation that the Nazis were executed for at Nuremberg.

Of course, Barack Obama and Donald Trump also perpetrated aggressive war, against Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and other targets which likewise never threatened the U.S., but they were likewise not prosecuted for it. Right now, under President Joe Biden, even just a month into his Presidency, Caitlin Johnstone headlined on February 27th, “U.S. bombs Syria and ridiculously claims self defense” — yet again, aggressive war, by the U.S. regime (and that was after his predecessor Trump and U.S. allies had perpetrated a 100-missile strike against Syria that likewise was based on a baldfaced lie).

Instead of fearing to be held to account like the Nazis were at Nuremberg, America’s tyrants face no such international prosecutions whatsoever. Only good leaders become assassinated in America. The Deep State gets rid of them. Today’s American Government is clearly fascist — and not like Franco was fascist but like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were fascist: imperialistic fascists.

One of the reasons for this is that the lies that the U.S. mainstream media make public are rebroadcast in all of its vassal-nations’ ‘news’ media. On 19 April 2018, just five days after the U.S. and its allies had committed an international war-crime by invading Syria on the basis of lies, RT headlined “U.S. media’s love affair with war: Major outlets showed zero opposition to Syria strikes”, and they made the case against the U.S.-and-allied regimes: for example, “Out of 26 newspaper editorials on the strikes, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found no dissenting voices.” If that isn’t a totalitarian country, then what is? And the United States has a higher percentage of its population being in prison than does any other nation on the planet. How is that NOT a “regime”? (Many ‘news’-sites refuse to publish my articles because I use the term “regime” to refer to today’s U.S. Government. Honesty is forbidden, in and by the U.S. regime.)

At least regarding international news-reporting, the highest percentage of fake-‘news’ is in America’s mainstream ‘news’-media, because only a few of America’s news-sites (all of which are small because no billionaire is funding them) even try to filter-out the many lies that come from the U.S. Government about foreign governments.

Up until February 1st of 2021, U.S.-and-allied international news reported obsessively about Alexei Navalny, who was being promoted throughout the U.S. empire as an ‘anti-corruption’ campaigner against Putin. But then on February 1st, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’” countering a string of U.S.-and-allied lies about the case, and Russia’s RT headlined “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal” and opened:

The tape, which was first reported by RT television on Monday, is said to have been filmed by the Federal Security Service (FSB) sometime in 2012 and allegedly shows a meeting between Vladimir Ashurkov and an employee of the British Embassy in Moscow. Ashurkov is the executive director of the FBK, Alexey Navalny’s anti-corruption organization.

The person he met at a Moscow cafe was identified as James William Thomas Ford, then Second Secretary for political affairs of the UK embassy in Russia. The FSB suspected he was an MI6 agent working under diplomatic cover. The discussion presents problematic optics for Navalny and the FBK team, and appears to support the Russian government’s claim that they deserve to be considered foreign agents.

Part of Ashurkov’s pitch, recorded secretly by the security service, was dedicated to fundraising.

“If we had more money, we would expand our team, of course,” he said, adding that his goal of obtaining “a little money” like “10, 20 million dollars a year” would make a huge difference. “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake. And that’s the message I am trying to project in my fundraising efforts and talking to people in the business community,” he said. …

That is treason. And what is the normal penalty for treason? But instead, the Russian Government has prosecuted, convicted, and on-and-off imprisoned him, only for cases of fraud and embezzlement, and the U.S. regime and its allies lie and allege that Navalny, who is extremely unpopular and widely despised by the Russian public, has been a hero in the view of most Russians and would be the winner in any election where he would be fairly contesting against Putin. Perhaps Putin simply doesn’t want Navalny to be executed for treason because Russia’s enemies would then immortalize Navalny as having been a martyr for ‘honest government’ and ‘against corruption’.

Here is a video that Alexei Navalny posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches.

An article by Kevin Rothrock, on 25 April 2017, “How Alexey Navalny Abandoned Russian Nationalism”, explained Navalny’s switch from being an exterminationist far-right-wing nationalist libertarian Russian to gravitating, after 2011, toward the U.S. liberal position and the key event that caused him to become intensely backed by the U.S. regime being the February 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine and the subsequent breakaway of both Donbass and Crimea. Rothrock quoted a Russian commentator: “The story with Crimea, where Putin acted like a Russian nationalist [no, Putin acted like a Russian patriot, and patriotism isn’t, at all, the same as nationalism] for the first and only time in his 15-year rule, plunged Navalny into deep confusion. He didn’t know how to act. Support the reabsorption of Crimea? But then they’d consider you a Putin supporter. Oppose it? Well then say goodbye to your patriot image.” (Obviously, that commentator equated “patriotism” and “nationalism.”) This was during the period when Navalny decided that he’d better stick with his ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, in order to replace Putin. The nationalism focus would no longer work for him. And patriotism was alien to Navalny’s character, just as it is alien to the character of any traitor.

Key to all of this is that the major media hide, instead of report about (such as is being done here), each-others’ fraudulence. Amongst all of America’s major media (and also in the majority of this country’s ‘alternative news’ media, since the majority of those, too, are controlled by billionaires), the thing that is the most forbidden of all to report is the fraudulence of any of them — even not to report this against their own competitors — because they’re all in this together. The few sites that are honest are small and therefore no threat to the rest. Though some news sites are controlled by Democratic billionaires, and other news sites are controlled by Republican billionaires, they’re virtually all controlled by U.S.-and-allied billionaires (and/or a few centimillionaires). This is a class-war, not a war within any class. And the lower classes are only victims in it, not perpetrators of it. Only the top class participates in this war against all of the other classes, and against foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires require the U.S. Government to replace. (And Karl Marx got this wrong: it’s not the “bourgeoisie” — the middle class — that’s the problem. It’s the aristocracy — the top wealth class — that is, and always was. Imperialism comes from the aristocracy — not from the middle class — and is a major part of the problem, but only a part. There is lots more harm that billionaires do, which is of the purely domestic or internal-affairs type.)

The media in U.S. and allied nations simply refuse to publish the reality of their respective government’s policy-objectives regarding Russia and China. That objective is conquest, first by subversion (exploiting traitors) and then by any other means that are necessary. The regime’s media are not to be trusted — especially not on international news. The lying there is unanimous, on foreign affairs. Whereas Democratic Party sites foment hatred against Republicans, and Republican Party sites foment hatred against Democrats (and are so far-right as to be also White-supremacist, the new-Dixiecrat party, which even needs the support of KKKers), all of the regime’s media foment hatred against any foreign leaders whom America’s billionaires want to replace. Truth is dangerous to the regime, but truth is patriotic everywhere.

Of course, this doesn’t show itself only in U.S.-Russia and U.S.-China relations. For example, America is also allied with the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, and they want the oil that’s in Yemen; so, America, which sells more weapons to the Sauds than to any other country, is also supplying and guiding the Sauds’ bombing of the food-supply lines that feed the Houthis, who control an oil-rich part of Yemen. The strategy of America and the Sauds is to starve these people out, to slaughter enough of them in this famine so as to take that oil. Walter Bragman at “The Daily Poster” (one of the few American news-sites that’s not controlled by billionaires) explained this on April 22nd, under the headline “I Feel The World Is Turning A Blind Eye: While the Biden administration drags its feet on the Yemen crisis, aid workers on the ground there say the situation is worse than ever.” It’s the sort of news that’s NOT “Fit to Print” in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and etc. Nobody in America turns a profit publishing the important truths. The people who have the money won’t support any of that. But publishing the right lies will draw money from billionaires like garbage attracts flies. (However, even “The Daily Poster” doesn’t report on the fraudulence of the billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media. Nobody does that, except Glenn Greenwald, and now he, too, is only an independent blogger. Nobody will hire him. In effect: there’s no market for truth in America, and in its allied regimes.)

On April 19th, Jeremy Kuzmarov at Covert Action Magazine headlined “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin — Former Member of Raytheon Board of Directors — Has Awarded Over $2.36 Billion in Contracts to Raytheon Since His Confirmation in January” and he documented that Raytheon had previously sold billions of dollars worth of the weapons that are causing the famine in Yemen, and that Raytheon is especially close to the Saudi royal family:

Raytheon was … the first major defense contractor to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, selling the kingdom over 1,000 cluster bombs designed to maximize civilian casualties between 1970 and 1995. The company further hired members of the Saudi Royal Family as consultants, and opened a branch in Riyadh in 2017. …

In 2019, Raytheon sold an estimated $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are centrally involved in the war in Yemen. After an October 2016 Saudi airstrike on a funeral home in Sana’a that killed 140 people and wounded 500 more, human rights workers discovered a bomb shard bearing the identification number of Raytheon.[2] It was one of at least 12 attacks on civilians that human rights groups tied to Raytheon’s ordnance during the first two years of the war. In order to secure the lucrative Saudi deals, Raytheon took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials to lobby their former colleagues, and later benefitted by having their former top lobbyist, Mark Esper, appointed as Defense Secretary in June 2019 in a precursor to General Austin’s hiring.

Kuzmarov had also headlined on April 15th “Biden’s Claim To Be Ending America’s Longest War Misleading” and he documented that though Biden is ordering the acknowledged U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by September 11th,

As of January, more than 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, according to a Defense Department report, when official troop totals had been reduced to 2,500. These totals reflect the U.S. government’s strategy of outsourcing war to the benefit of private mercenary corporations, and as a means of distancing the war from the public and averting dissent, since relatively few Americans are directly impacted by it.

Unfortunately, Scott Ritter had unintentionally erred in the last word of the headline when he headlined at RT on April 14th “U.S. to withdraw from Afghanistan after two decades of war leaving behind a tortured wasteland and having accomplished… NOTHING”. That invasion and military occupation of Afghanistan has accomplished a lot — and will continue to accomplish more — for the people whom the U.S. Government, America’s actual military government, serves as its top priority: U.S.-and-allied billionaires (who own those Government-contractors). Kuzmarov’s report documented, for example, that “One of the biggest mercenary companies is DynCorp International of Falls Church Virginia, which has received over $7 billion in government contracts to train the Afghan army and manage military bases in Afghanistan. From 2002-2013, DynCorp received 69 percent of all State Department funding. Forbes Magazine called it ‘one of the big winners of the Iraq and Afghan Wars;’ the losers being almost everyone else.”

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that privatizing everything is a better way of running a country, and this Biden policy regarding Afghanistan is the reality of it. Furthermore, spending this money through the U.S. State Department instead of through the U.S. ‘Defense’ (Aggression) Department, sounds so much kinder and gentler. Everything is about fooling the public.

And, yet, Americans continue to subscribe to the media, and to vote for the political candidates, who — not merely once but time-after-time and constantly — are perpetrating those U.S.-imperialist lies (such as against Saddam in 2002-, Gaddafi in 2011-, Assad in 2012-, Yanukovych in 2013-, Maduro in 2015-, and Putin and Xi always).

The majority of Americans are blinded by their particular political Party’s propaganda and read (and listen to) only the ‘news’-media that are controlled by the billionaires who fund their particular Party. This is true for academics just as much as it’s true for the general public. As an example of the obliviousness by academics: in 2012, the scholarly journal Psychological Science published a 26-page ‘study’, “Misinformation and Its Correction: Continued Influence and Successful Debiasing”, which simply assumed that the America’s mainstream ‘news’-media are honest and don’t intentionally deceive the public. Its five authors were presuming that only Republicans are a problem, and they also were ignoring the entire matter of CIA and major-media collusion in the deceptive reporting of international ‘news’ throughout the major ‘news’-media, and were ignoring the entire U.S. power-structure and its control by billionaires. (It was pompous, pontificating, stupidity, which is unfortunately normal even for peer-reviewed journals in the psychological and social ‘sciences’.) The lies are, at the top, not only intentional, but carefully planned.

Glenn Greenwald headlined on April 16th, “Journalists, Learning They Spread a CIA Fraud About Russia, Instantly Embrace a New One”, and he called attention to the nearly simultaneous climb-down that the regime’s media had done on their accusation back on June 26th that “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says” at the same time while the Government (which initiated and had been lying about that matter ever since) were now

targeting … Russian-Ukrainian political consultant, Konstantin Kilimnik, with new sanctions. One sentence of this press release asserted a claim that the Mueller investigation, after searching for eighteen months, never found: namely, that “Kilimnik provided the Russia intelligence services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” that he received from then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

Is it true that Kilimnik passed this polling data to the Kremlin? Maybe. But there is no way for a rational person — let alone someone calling themselves a “journalist” — to conclude that it is true. Why? Because, like the CIA tale about Russian bounties — a claim they learned yesterday had no evidence — this is nothing more than a U.S. Government assertion that lacks any evidence.

Supposedly, America’s major ‘news’-media are mere suckers for being repeatedly spreaders of “fake news” from the U.S. Government; but they are, instead, just another privatized part of that Government.

On April 15th, Russia announced that beginning “next week,” and continuing at least until October, Russia will prevent any military vessels of or allied with the United States from passing through the Kerch Strait, which transits from the Black Sea, into the Sea of Azov, which latter accesses the conflict-zone near Ukraine’s coast (see the map, showing this Strait). Only governmental, not commercial ships, would be prohibited passage by Russia. However, the warmongering American Axios ‘news’ site reported this as referring instead to merchant ships, commercial vessels (as if it weren’t intended to prevent U.S. warships from getting too close to Russia and to Ukraine’s conflict-zone). Axios headlined about this matter on April 20th (five days later), “Scoop: Leaked Ukraine memo reveals scope of Russia’s aggression” (though it wasn’t “leaked” but had been openly published by Ukraine’s Government as having been reported to it by Russia’s Government; and it wasn’t a “Scoop” because it was already five days old). This lying ‘news’-report by Axios went on to assert that “Russia has been holding last-minute military exercises near commercial shipping lanes in the Black Sea that threaten to strangle Ukraine’s economy, according to an internal document from Ukraine’s ministry of defense reviewed by Axios. … Russia announced it intends to block foreign ships in parts of the Black Sea. … The leaked memo shows Russian forces escalating their presence on all sides of the Ukrainian border.” However, in reality, Russia’s action didn’t relate to commercial shipping, at all.

Axios had been launched by money from a few intensely neoconservative Democratic Party billionaires, including Brian Roberts who controls NBC, and also including the person who controls ABC and The Atlantic, Laureen Powell Jobs, who is the heir to the Apple Computer and Disney fortune of her deceased husband Steve Jobs.

Of course, since such ‘news’-reporting is loaded with lies, U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media also need lots of hired ‘non-governmental’ ‘independent’ ‘experts’ to quote ‘explaining’ and ‘justifying’ U.S. foreign policies. A typical such organization is The International Crisis Group. This is yet another example of privatization of the U.S. military state.

On April 22nd, I headlined “The International Crisis Group: Do its funders control the world on behalf of American-and-allied billionaires?” and identified the main funders of that ‘nonpartisan’ ‘non-profit’ ‘expert’ commentator on international relations, which is often cited and interviewed by the U.S. regime’s media. These are people who are billionaires, and who serve billionaires, but the billionaires themselves prefer not to be mentioned and instead for the public ‘credit’ (as funding such front-organizations) to go to the other ‘non-profits’ that they control. This way, the U.S. regime is kept anonymous. (For more information on the International Crisis Group, see Matthew Ehret’s 17 November 2020 “Lord Malloch Brown Revealed: The British Hand Behind the Coup Shows Its Scales Again”.) And that is today’s American ‘democracy’. It’s trying to rule the entire world, through remote control (vassal leaders in each ‘allied’ nation). Part of the plan is for the UN to wither and ultimately die. (This is Truman’s world — definitely not FDR’s.)

On March 1st, Gallup headlined “China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows” and closed their article on an optimistic (for neoconservatives — which includes all U.S.-and allied billionaires) note for the new Biden Administration in Washington and for NATO, by saying: “China and Russia are among the more challenging nations for U.S. foreign policy under the Biden administration, as they were for the prior Obama and Trump administrations. But Biden’s task may be made a bit easier if the current low favorable ratings mean Americans are unified in their perceptions of the challenges each country presents.” The rank-order there, of the approval-ratings by Americans regarding all 18 countries in that report, was virtually exactly the same as had been the ‘news’-slant in U.S. mainstream media — both of the right and of the left — regarding each one of those countries, during recent years. Media made that rank-order the way it is. That rank-order was: Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, India, Israel, Taiwan, Mexico, Egypt, Cuba, The Palestinian Authority, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea. America’s vassal-nations or ‘allies’ had gotten favorable ‘news’-slants (propaganda) in U.S. ‘news’-media, while America’s target-nations (which the U.S. regime and its CIA are trying to conquer) had gotten unfavorable ‘news’-slants (propaganda) from them — and that shaped this rank-order.

In fact, at Gallup’s “Country Ratings”, is shown these country ratings month-by-month, and all of them have changed, over time, in the same way that America’s ‘news’-media-coverage of the given country had been changing before that. The ‘news’-media had prepped the American public to invade and destroy Iraq in 2003, and to invade and destroy Libya in 2011, and to invade and destroy Syria since 2012, etc., and, therefore anyone who (like many billionaires) owns stock in a corporation such as Lockheed Martin and who wants to increase his or her wealth, is going to be concerned about keeping up the fear and hatred that Americans feel toward the leaders of the target-countries, so that sanctions and ultimately invasions will be supported by the American people, and the U.S.-and-allied nations will become enabled to increase their ‘defense’-budgets (going to firms such as Raytheon), against such countries..

Whereas Canada, Great Britain, France, Japan, Germany, India, Israel, and Taiwan, are ‘allies’ and markets for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin; Cuba, The Palestinian Authority, Russia, Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Iran, and North Korea, are instead targets for their products; and this is how U.S. foreign policy is formed, and how the ‘news’-slant is formed, in the United States — which shapes that rank-order. Those corporations need not only ‘allies’, markets for their products, but also ‘enemies’, targets for their products.

Minds are easy things to manipulate if the people who are doing the manipulating want to manipulate them. How to do it has been understood for at least a hundred years. In a word, it’s done by lying. (Think about ‘Saddam’s WMD’, for example.) At least ever since the end of World War Two in the U.S., the U.S. regime has had an extremely effective system for doing that. In the CIA, it used to be called “Operation Mockingbird” (originally called “Project Mockingbird”), and it included (and still includes) all of the nation’s major and most of its minor media. (Carl Bernstein wrote about that CIA operation in Rolling Stone on 20 October 1977, “THE CIA AND THE MEDIA”, and that was a softer version of the reality, which didn’t even mention the word “Mockingbird.”) The CIA’s own records on it lied, saying that it had only briefly existed, during the early 1960s: “During its short tenure, MOCKINGBIRD established the identities of a significant number of sources and ‘cooperative’ individuals. Much of this information was of a partisan political nature or was in the nature of seeking a ‘plug.’11” Not in law but in reality, the CIA exists to fool Americans; it isn’t merely to fool foreigners. It manipulates mass-minds in all U.S.-and-allied countries, and doesn’t do it only in countries where it’s fomenting or trying to foment coups. Though liberal media such as CNN and conservative media such as Fox News criticize each other, and so do America’s political Parties criticize each other, they all are on the side of the ‘us’, “the U.S.A” (controlled by America’s billionaires) and its ‘allies’ (vassal-nations) such as NATO, against the ‘them’ (which our rulers create), ‘our’ ‘enemies’, against whom the regime (all of the billionaires who control the entire system and hire its ‘news’ media and politicians, and own its ‘defense’ contractors) is propagandizing.

This has become the permanent war, since 1945 — the U.S. constant-warfare state, the world’s first global empire — and that’s something which is prohibited for any U.S. mainstream ‘news’-medium to report exists.

For example, before America conquered and destroyed Iraq on March 20th of 2003, Gallup found that only 5% of Americans were “Favorable” to Iraq during 14-15 March 2003, and that this had been approximately the figure ever since at least 1991, but in Gallup’s next polling on that question, during 9-12 February 2004, 21% of Americans were “Favorable” to Iraq, and this 21% figure has steadily remained approximately the same figure ever since. After America conquered and controlled Iraq, the U.S. coverage of Iraq’s Government improved considerably, and therefore American’s approval of Iraq suddenly shot up, and has stayed up, because the media’s lying against Iraq plunged after the conquest.

What the ‘news’-media won’t report about is that they are all in this public-deception operation together and they are all controlled by America’s fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires, the people who control U.S.-based international corporations and who fund politicians into Congress and the White House. They are America’s authentic masters, and their ‘news’-media misrepresent America (such as that it’s a ‘democracy’) and don’t only misrepresent foreign countries. The big problem with competition is always who controls it, and if the only people who control it, ultimately, are the billionaires who control the ‘news’-media, and who control the ‘defense’-contractors such as General Dynamics which sell only to the U.S. Government and to its allied governments, then, of course, there will result a direct correlation between those Gallup rankings, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the intentions that America’s billionaires collectively have, regarding which nations to sanction, or to coup, or to invade, next. All of this operation — every part of it — exists but is censored-out of all of that ‘news’-reporting, because the ultimate scandal is those billionaires themselves, and is their collective control over the system that they call ‘democracy’, which is very different from any actual democracy. Where the billionaires rule, it can be called an “oligarchy” if it’s a banana republic, but it is more commonly called an “aristocracy” if it’s instead an imperialistic country, such as Britain, or France, or Nazi Germany, or Hirohito’s Japan, or today’s United States. Anyway, it’s certainly no democracy. How can America be a democracy and yet have a higher percentage of its citizenry in prison than any of the other 220 nations on Earth does? It’s not possible. And yet all of the U.S.-and-allied media say it’s not only possible, but real.

Here are a few current examples of how this mass-deceit functions, and these examples dig a bit deeper than the findings in that March 1st Gallup factual report, so as to explain those findings, by pointing out what causes those findings (that rank-order) to be the way that they are:

Also on March 1st, the German “Moon of Alabama” blogger headlined “Biden Breaks Campaign Promise On MbS Punishment — Psaki Lies To Hide That — Guardian Fakes Quote To Hide Psaki’s Lie”, and he documented that Biden, and America’s foreign allies, are actually NOT concerned about either democracy, or basic decency, from rulers that the U.S. is allied with. (The main issue there was the luring, trapping, and murdering, of Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on 2 October 2018.) The very next day, on the 2nd of March, Reuters reported that the exact opposite treatment is being given by these same leaders (U.S. and its ‘allies’) to countries that the U.S. and its allies are trying to conquer, specifically Russia, but also including nations that are on good terms with Russia, such as China, Syria, and Iran (countries that scored near the bottom of Gallup’s favorability-list). All of this that “MoA” was reporting relates to lying and hypocrisy that is done by U.S.-and-allied leaders and their ‘news’-media while they still proclaim that they are ‘democracies’ who are opposing countries that aren’t. How often does one see or hear U.S. media saying that other U.S. media have lied about a factual matter? They may report that a politician of the opposite Party had lied, but never that one of their own competitors had lied. They cover for one-another. They absolutely refuse to publish anything about the corruptness of America’s mainstream — and most of its non-mainstream (but also billionaire-controlled) — ‘news’-media. What U.S.-&-allied ‘news’-media refuse to publish, at all, is their own systematic complicity in the lying that goes on, day after day, for decades on end. It’s not only the Government that lies constantly.

The front page of the Weekend Edition of the Financial Times headlined, on February 20th, “Biden tells world ‘America is back’ but warns democracy under assault”, and quoted Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, as saying that “The prospects for multilateralism are much better this year than they were two years ago, and that has a lot to do with Joe Biden becoming US president.” However, nothing concrete was reported achieved from Biden’s participation in the February 19th virtual G7 Conference, which was sponsored from Munich. Merkel (as a U.S. vassal) naturally wants favorable relations with the new U.S. President, but spoke only in platitudes, because the U.S. regime’s demand that Germany not buy Russia’s inexpensive pipelined natural gas but instead buy America’s vastly more expensive canned liquefied natural gas, is too much even for a vassal, such as she, to accept. She doesn’t want to make blatantly obvious, to her voters, that she’s their enemy. Even a vassal-leader needs to look not only upward to the imperial master, but downward to the population whose votes she will also need.

Then, on March 2nd, the next step in the ratcheting-up of U.S.-and-allied sanctions against Russia was announced. Reuters headlined “U.S. imposes sanctions on Russia over poisoning of Navalny”, and reported “The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and entities over Russia’s attempt to kill opposition figure Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent, senior Biden administration officials said. … The moves were being taken in coordination with the European Union. They reiterated President Joe Biden’s call for Russia to release Navalny from prison.” Biden was using the Navalny case as a ‘moral’ reason why Germany must not buy Russia’s natural gas.

A month before that, on February 1st, Russia’s Foreign Ministry had issued, both in Russian and in English, a detailed timeline regarding the Navalny case, headlining “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’”. It pointed out key events that had not been reported in U.S.-and-allied media but only in non-U.S.-allied media. Because it did point out those things, there was no coverage, in the U.S.-and-allied countries, of that Russian news-report.

The U.S. and UK Governments function together internationally almost as one, and therefore, also on February 1st, Russia’s RT channel headlined with yet another important event in this matter that had never been reported-on in The West: “Top Navalny aide asked alleged British spy for millions in funding, intelligence video released by Russia’s FSB claims to reveal”. Included there, was a video that Russian counter-intelligence had recorded in 2012, a video of the Russian ‘anti-corruption activist’ Alexey Navalny’s #2 man Vladimir Ashurkov discussing with an alleged MI6 agent (James William Thomas Ford, Second Secretary for political affairs at the UK embassy in Russia) inside a Moscow restaurant, as to whether MI6 would donate to Navalny’s operation “a little money,” such as “10, 20 million dollars a year.” “And this is not a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake.” (Navalny’s operation was implicitly acknowledging there, that they aim to assist billionaires.) It would help Navalny create “mass protests, civil initiatives, establishing contacts,” etc. But the UK official suggested instead “turning to Transparency International for grants. Ashurkov said he doubted that working with Transparency ‘would be effective’.” However, what happened afterward is not publicly known. Ashurkov, at this same meeting, additionally asked for MI6 to supply Navalny’s group with dirt on Russia’s Government that they could then “release in conjunction with the Henry Jackson Society,” which is the British Conservative Party’s think tank that’s named after the far-right U.S. Democratic Party Senator (a closeted version of the Republican Party’s infamous Joseph R. McCarthy) who had started the neoconservative movement, and who especially hated Russia.

In the United States, anyone who would be caught trying to sell-out America’s Government to any other government would be prosecuted for treason, and publicly executed. Russia did not do that to Navalny. On February 2nd, a Moscow court replaced Navalny’s three and a half year suspended sentence for violating parole on a prior conviction, with an actual prison sentence, minus the amount of time he had spent under house arrest, meaning he would spend over two and half years in “a corrective labor colony.” That imprisonment of Navalny increased the numbers of Russians who demonstrated against Putin in various cities throughout Russia in support of Navalny.

The idea that the Russian Government poisoned Alexei Navalny presumes such astounding stupidity on the part of Russia’s Government as to be exceedingly dubious, at best. On 5 September 2020, right before the latest Russian Presidential election, the internationally respected Levada polling organization in Russia reported that the top choice of Russians to lead the country was Putin at 56%, the second-from-top choice was Zhirinovsky at 5%, and Alexey Navalny (shown there as Алексей Навальный), was the third-from-top choice, at 2%. In the 2018 Presidential election, Zhirinovsky polled at 13.7%, Grudinin polled at 12.0%, and Putin polled at 72.6%. The actual election-outcome was Putin 76.69%, Grudinin 11.7%, and Zhirinovsky 5.65%. The idea that Putin would need to kill anyone in order to be leading Russia is so stupid and uninformed (and mis-informed) that it is beyond belief, though it is widely publicized in The West as being instead the reality. The contempt that U.S.-and-allied leaders and ‘news’-media have for their respective publics is so clear that provable lies are presented to the public as being instead proven truths. But what is true is that Navalny has been an immense propaganda-asset to the U.S. Government, and he now is especially so. Stirring up anti-Russian hatred is the best way for the U.S. and UK Governments to get the EU to oppose Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline. Whether U.S. or UK intelligence agencies were behind the 2020 poisoning of Navalny in order to blame it on Russia so as to get the EU to oppose Nord Stream 2 is speculative, but certainly it is likelier than that Putin was behind that poisoning.

Furthermore, Wikipedia notes that Ashurkov “is in contact with Mikhail Khodorkovsky.” In other words, Navalny’s ‘anti-corruption campaign’ is being backed by the man who had gained the most from Russia’s most corrupt period, which was when Boris Yeltsin was in power during the 1990s. (And look at what that corruption did to Russia’s economy.) That’s what the U.S. regime wants to be re-installed in Russia. It’s no wonder, then, why Ashurkov, and his boss, Navalny, are trying to sell-out Russia.

Here is a video that Alexei Navalny posted to youtube on 19 September 2007, under the title of “НАРОД за легализацию оружия” meaning “PEOPLE for the legalization of weapons”:

He was saying there that all Russians should get guns in order to kill Muslims who are infesting Russia, which would be like swatting big flies or stamping on big cockroaches.

An excellent article by Kevin Rothrock, on 25 April 2017, “How Alexey Navalny Abandoned Russian Nationalism”, explains Navalny’s switch from being an exterminationist far-right-wing nationalist libertarian Russian to gravitating, after 2011, toward the U.S. liberal position and the key event that caused him to become intensely backed by the U.S. regime being the February 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine and subsequent breakaway of both Donbass and Crimea. Rothrock quoted a Russian commentator: “The story with Crimea, where Putin acted like a Russian nationalist for the first and only time in his 15-year rule, plunged Navalny into deep confusion. He didn’t know how to act. Support the reabsorption of Crimea? But then they’d consider you a Putin supporter. Oppose it? Well then say goodbye to your patriot image.” This was when Navalny decided that he’d better stick with the ‘anti-corruption’ campaign, in order to replace Putin. The nationalism focus would no longer work for him.

The media in U.S. and allied nations simply refuse to publish the reality of their respective government’s policy-objectives regarding Russia and China. Here, from the great independent geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris, is a fine example of the type of analysis that they censor-out — block their public from having access to. It’s much more insightful than the U.S.-and-allied major-media coverage, and the February 19th virtual G7 Conference might as well have preceded as followed after (as it did) his comments. I have turned this video presentation by him on February 12th into a transcript, for anyone who would prefer that to listening to the 14-minute video. His presentation separates the surface from the substance, none of which was changed by that Conference — it’s still the situation, presented, with honest  insight:

——

Good day. It is becoming increasingly clear that Germany greatly overplayed its hand with Russia over the Navalny affair. As we all know, Alexey Navalny the Russian dissident leader was brought to Germany following an agreement between the Russian and German governments after he fell ill on a flight from the Russian city of Tomsk and was treated in a hospital in Omsk. Whilst in Germany the German government on the basis of laboratory findings from a Bundeswehr laboratory and a laboratory in Sweden claimed that Navalny had been poisoned with novichok, the famous Russian nerve agent which we hear so much about, and pointed its finger at senior officials within the Russian leadership as being responsible and called for Russia to institute a criminal investigation. The Germans also dropped all sorts of hints that if the Russians did not launch that investigation they the Germans or at least the European Union would retaliate with possible and potential sanctions and there were even some suggestions that the North Stream Two gas pipeline between Russia and Germany would either be cancelled or would be put on hold.

If this ploy or strategy relating to Navalny was intended to put the Russians in a difficult place, then it’s clear that it wasn’t thought through properly. In fact the Russians pushed back very hard, refused to open an investigation, and demanded to see the evidence that the Germans said pointed to Navalny having been poisoned by novichok. This evidence, for unknown reasons, the Germans and the various laboratories involved and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have refused to supply, lending doubts to the credibility of the whole German and western narrative around Navalny’s poisoning, but then of course further things happened. Navalny himself decided to return to Moscow or perhaps was persuaded to return there — there’s been some dispute about this — and on arrival was arrested and brought before a court and is now facing a three-year prison term because of his breach of parole conditions for an for an earlier sentence. Protests then followed in Moscow and other Russian cities which contrary to some claims in the western media seem to have been poorly attended, and the result was more demands from more people around the west for more action to be taken against Russia. It has become increasingly clear, over the rush the last few days, that the Germans in particular, the country which has arguably the greatest interest in a strong relationship with Russia, is not prepared to take any step which would in fact break important diplomatic and economic connections to Russia. The German government seems to have categorically rejected any step for example to cancel or suspend or put on hold the Nordstream 2 pipeline. In fact we’ve now had statements about Nordstream 2 from a growing number of German officials. The German economics minister Peter Altmeier has come out in support of it, so has the German President Frank Walter Steinmeier, who has referred to Nordstream 2 as a bridge to Russia and has pointedly reminded Germans that this year is the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s fateful attack on Russia — on the Soviet Union — on 22nd June 1941, the episode, the operation, known as Operation Barbarossa, and this comment about Nordstream 2 being a bridge to Russia has also now been made in rather passionate terms by German foreign minister Heiko Maas who is widely assumed or thought by many people to be one of the most anti-Russian personalities within the German government. In fact not only did Heiko Maas talk about Nordstream 2 being a bridge to Russia but he also spoke in terms of the cancellation of Nordstream 2 accelerating the trend for Russia to detach itself from Europe and possibly seek friends elsewhere — of course he means China but he doesn’t (as is always the case he didn’t) want to say that. Angela Merkel herself, as is always the case, maintains a sphinx-like silence on these issues, but she too has signaled her continued support for Nordstream 2 and her continued wish for continued dialogue with Russia. Her likely successor Armin Laschet has also made clear that he too supports Nordstream 2 and wants to see the pipeline completed and wants to maintain close links with Russia. Moreover the Germans are now apparently in negotiation with the Biden administration to have U.S sanctions on Nordstream 2 [that were] imposed by the Trump administration eased or lifted. The talk apparently is of a mechanism being created whereby if Russia were to cease to supply natural gas through Ukraine — through the pipelines that run through Ukraine — Germany would somehow switch off Nordstream 2. That is, I have to say, a complete non-starter. If that is indeed what the Biden administration and the Germans are negotiating, then the Biden administration is going to give up the sanctions or ease the sanctions, in return effectively for nothing. [Here is why:]

There is no possibility at all that if Russia and Ukraine have another gas war so that Russian gas deliveries through Ukraine are switched off, Germany would damage its own economy in solidarity with Ukraine by switching off Nordstream 2 and denying itself Russian gas [which is vastly cheaper than America’s liquefied natural gas that the Trump Administration were insisting the EU use instead]. This bears all the hallmarks of a face-saving compromise whereby the Germans get what what they want and the Biden administration is able to walk away and say that it has again achieved something when in fact it has achieved nothing.

As I’ve discussed in other videos already we see the Biden administration copying in many respects things that Obama used to do, and this sort of negotiation is a case in point. Anyway let’s put all that to one side.

It’s clear that the Germans are not prepared to sever their relations with Russia. All the talk now is of sanctions in the run-up to the European Council meeting at the end of February, but it’s also clear that those sanctions when they come will be sanctions against individual Russian officials; they will not extend to sanctions against Russia as a whole, or even against major sectors of the Russian economy, like the sectoral sanctions which the EU imposed on Russia in 2014. The Russians are used to these sanctions on individual Russian business figures and political leaders and security officials and even on Russian companies. They will simply shrug their shoulders and carry on exactly as before.

So we see token actions from Germany which really are intended to give the appearance of action when in reality there is none, giving the Russians every confidence that the Germans actually are now fully committed and invested in maintaining their relationship with the Russians and are not going to do anything to jeopardize it.

Well, perhaps that is a good thing, perhaps on balance it is as well that the Germans are now clarifying fully what their intentions are. I suspect that the Germans have been spooked by commentaries that have been coming out of Moscow and indeed from the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov that Russia has given up any idea of forging a relationship with the EU, that it no longer sees the EU and by extension Germany as a reliable partner, that Russia is now going to pursue a EurAsian policy and that it will focus instead on developing its relationship with China. I think this has been very unsettling to the Germans, and I think that they are unnerved and alarmed by it and I think that they are therefore changing course. I’m also starting to think that the disastrous visit by Joseph Borrell the EU external affairs commissioner to Moscow, which took place last week and which I’ve discussed at great detail in previous programs, was partly intended as a way by the Germans to open some kind of line of communication to the Russians to reassure the Russians that some kind of active dialogue between the EU and Russia would continue. If so, what the Germans will have found is that the Russians are in no mood to make any sort of concession at all and that they expect any future relationship between the EU and Russia and between Germany and Russia specifically to be conducted from now on increasingly on Russian terms. Well, as I said, it’s probably better that the Germans have clarified where they stand on this. I say that though of course the EU council meeting has not yet taken place and it’s possible that we may still see surprises there, but given the noises that are coming out of Berlin I would be surprised if that was the case.

How did the Germans get into this position?

I think the Germans need to understand that in dealing with Russia you have to be as Otto von Bismarck the German chancellor who spoke Russian, was once Prussia’s ambassador to the Russian court in Saint Petersburg and knew the Russians well. What the Germans need to understand is that when dealing with Russia you have ultimately to play a straight game. Bismarck put it very well. He said that with the Russians you should play straight or not at all. If you want confrontation with them they will accept that. If you want to deal with them they will accept that too. But they will not accept a game where you are both seeking to deal with them and confronting them at the same time. That is unsustainable. It’s a shame and a pity that it took so long [to recognize this] and obviously adventures and episodes like the Navalny affair will not be tolerated further. In future we will see how well and how fully this lesson has been learned in Berlin. If the Germans want a long-term confrontation with Russia they can have it. If the Germans want a strong relationship with Russia they can have it too. They mustn’t expect the Russians to bend to their will. The Russians have never done that, and they never will.

——

That commentary accurately predicted the new economic sanctions that the U.S. and the EU are now (as-of March 2nd) imposing as a supposed response to Putin’s supposed guilt in the supposed novichok poisoning of a proven Russian traitor. I’d wager that it’s too good a commentary for U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media to allow their respective publics to hear, read, or otherwise get to know about. But we’ll see.

This report is being submitted to all of the major, and many of the smaller, newsmedia in the U.S., UK, Canada, and a few other countries, so that each of them will have an opportunity to publish it to their respective audience, if they wish to inform, instead of merely to propagandize, their audience.

theduran.com

By Max BLUMENTHAL

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.

The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”

Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.

“The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,” Williamson continued, “but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation spokesperson Jenny Vereker implicitly confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents in an emailed response to questions from The Grayzone. However, she contended, “The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.”

The tranche of leaked files closely resemble UK FCO-related documented released between 2018 and 2020 by a hacking collective calling itself Anonymous. The same source has claimed credit for obtaining the latest round of documents.

The Grayzone reported in October 2020 on leaked materials released by Anonymous which exposed a massive propaganda campaign funded by the UK FCO to cultivate support for regime change in Syria. Soon after, the Foreign Office claimed its computer systems had been penetrated by hackers, thus confirming their authenticity.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”

Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.

In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.

The UK FCO projects were carried out covertly, and in partnership with purportedly independent, high-profile online media outfits including Bellingcat, Meduza, and the Pussy Riot-founded Mediazona. Bellingcat’s participation apparently included a UK FCO intervention in North Macedonia’s 2019 elections on behalf of the pro-NATO candidate.

The intelligence contractors that oversaw that operation, the Zinc Network, boasted of establishing “a network of YouTubers in Russia and Central Asia” while “supporting participants [to] make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding.” The firm also touted its ability to “activate a range of content” to support anti-government protests inside Russia.

The new documents provide critical background on the role of NATO member states like the UK in influencing the color revolution-style protests waged in Belarus in 2020, and raise unsettling questions about the intrigue and unrest surrounding jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Further, the materials cast serious doubt on the independence of two of the world’s largest and most prestigious media organizations, revealing Reuters and the BBC as apparent intelligence cut-outs feasting at the trough of a British national security state that their news operations are increasingly averse to scrutinizing.

Reuters solicits secret British Foreign Office contract to infiltrate Russian media

A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

The revelation prompted a Reuters spokesman to declare that “the arrangement in 1969 [with the MI6] was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”

The Trust Principles outline a mission of “preserving [Reuters’] independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”

In its own statement of values, the BBC proclaims, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest.”

However, the newly leaked documents analyzed by The Grayzone appear to reveal that both Reuters and the BBC are engaged yet again in a non-transparent relationship with the UK’s foreign ministry to counter and undermine Russia.

In 2017, the non-profit arm of the Reuters media empire, the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), delivered a formal tender offering to “enter into a Contract with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as represented by the British Embassy Moscow, for the provision of a project ‘Capacity Building in Russian Media.’” The letter was signed by Reuters CEO Monique Ville on July 31, 2017.

Reuters’ tender was a response to a call for bids by the FCO, which sought help in implementing “a programme of themed tours to the UK by Russian journalists and online influencers.”

Working through the British Embassy in Moscow, the FCO sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

In 2019, the FCO put forward a similar initiative, this time articulating a more aggressive plan to “counter the Russian government’s narrative and domination of the media and information space.” In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK.

Reuters responded to both calls by the FCO with detailed tenders. In its first bid, the media giant boasted of establishing a global network of 15,000 journalists and bloggers through “capacity building interventions.” In Russia, it claimed at least 400 journalists had been cultivated through its training programs.

Reuters claimed to have performed 10 previous training tours for 80 Russian journalists on behalf of the British embassy in Moscow. It proposed eight more, promising to promote “UK cultural and political values” and “create a network of journalists across Russia” bonded together by a shared “interest in British affairs.”

Reuters’ tender highlighted the institutional prejudices and interventionist agenda that underlined its training programs. Detailing a series of UK FCO-funded programs dedicated to “countering Russian state-funded propaganda,” Reuters conflated Russian government narratives with extremism. Ironically, it referred to its own efforts at weakening them as “unbiased journalism.”

At the same time, Reuters appeared to recognize that its covert collaboration with the British Embassy in Moscow was highly provocative and potentially destructive to diplomatic relations. Recounting a UK FCO-funded tour it ran for Russian journalists in the midst of the Sergei Skripal affair, after the British government accused Moscow of poisoning a turncoat Russian intelligence officer who spied for Britain, the tender stated, “[Thomson Reuters Foundation] was in constant communication with the British Embassy in Moscow, to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.”

The mention by Reuters of the Belarusian TV Station Belsat, and its particular relevance “to the UK Government Strategy’s capacity to detect and counter the spread of Russian information” was notable. While describing itself as “the first independent television channel in Belarus,” Belsat is, as the Reuters tender makes clear, a vehicle of NATO influence.

Based in Poland and funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and other EU governments, Belsat played an influential role in promoting the color revolution-style protests that erupted in May 2020 to demand the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Ultimately, Reuters’ bid appears to have been successful, as it received a July 2019 contract with the FCO’s Conflict, Stability & Security Fund (CSSF). But neither entity seemed to want the public to know about their collaboration on a project designed to counter Russia. The contract was marked “Strictly Confidential.”

“Weaken the Russian state’s influence”

The programs exposed through the latest leak of documents operate under the auspices of a shadowy division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office called Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD). Led by an intelligence operative named Andy Pryce, the program has shrouded in secrecy.

Indeed, the British government has denied freedom of information requests about the division’s budget and stonewalled members of parliament like Chris Williamson who sought data about its budget and agenda, citing national security to block their demands for information.

“When I tried to probe further,” former MP Williamson told The Grayzone, “ministers refused to let me have access to any documents or correspondence relating to this organization’s activities.  I was told that releasing this information could ‘disrupt and undermine the program’s effectiveness.’”

During a meeting convened in London on June 26, 2018, Pryce outlined a new FCO program “to weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbors.” He solicited a consortium of firms to assist the British state in establishing new and seemingly independent media outlets to counter Russian government-backed media in Moscow’s immediate sphere of influence, and to amplify the messaging of NATO-aligned governments.

Justified on the basis of Russia’s supposed intention to “sow disunity and course[sic] disruption to democratic processes,” the campaign Pryce laid out was more aggressive and far-reaching than anything Russia has been caught doing in the West.

Pryce emphasized that secrecy was of the essence, warning that “some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO.”

A year later, the FCO’s CDMD division outlined a program to run through 2022 at a cost of $8.3 million to the British taxpayer. It aimed to establish new outlets and support preexisting media operations “to counter Russia’s efforts to sow disunity” and “increase resilience to hostile Kremlin messaging in the Baltic states.”

Thus the British government set out with an array of intelligence contractors to dominate Baltic media with pro-NATO messaging – and perhaps sow some disunity of its own.

As seen below, the BBC placed an apparently successful bid to participate in the covert Baltic program through its non-profit arm, known as BBC Media Action.

The BBC also proposed to participate in a separate UK FCO media propaganda program in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It named Reuters and a now-defunct intelligence contractor called Aktis Strategy, which participated in previous FCO CDMD programs, as key allies in its consortium.

The BBC identified local partners like Hromadske, a Kiev-based broadcast network born in the midst of the so-called Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that relied on ultra-nationalist muscle to remove an elected president and install a pro-NATO regime. Hromadske materialized almost overnight with seed money and logistical support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and billionaire media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Network Fund.

BBC Media Action proposed working through Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where a proxy war has raged since 2014 between the Western-backed Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. It was textbook information warfare, weaponizing broadcast media to turn the tide of battle in a protracted, grinding conflict.

The UK FCO propaganda campaign warned that “Kremlin-affiliated structures” could undermine the project if it was exposed. For a media organization that claims to place trust at the heart of its charter of values, the BBC was certainly operating under a high degree of secrecy.

The UK FCO’s meddling in Eastern Europe and the Baltics created a feeding frenzy among contractors seeking to provide “capacity building” and media development assistance on Russia’s periphery. Among the bidders were Reuters and veteran FCO contractors that had participated in an array of information warfare campaigns from Syria to the British home front.

The Consortium

Among the intelligence contractors bidding to participate in the UK FCO-funded Consortium were the Zinc Network and Albany Communications. As journalist Kit Klarenberg noted in a February 18 report on the recent FCO leaks, these firms “boast staff possessed of [security] clearances, individuals who previously served at the highest levels of government, the military and security services. They furthermore have extensive experience in conducting information warfare operations on London’s behalf the world over.”

Previously known as Breakthrough, Zinc has contracted for the UK Home Office to covertly implement media projects propagandizing British Muslims under the auspices of the Prevent de-radicalization initiative. In Australia, Zinc was caught running a clandestine program to promote support for government policies among Muslims.

Ben Norton reported for The Grayzone on Albany’s record of “secur[ing] the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance Western regime-change goals in Syria, while conducting public relations services on behalf of extremist Syrian militias funded by NATO member states and Gulf monarchies to destabilize the country.

In its bid for the UK FCO media program in the Baltic region, Albany proposed a series of satirical “interactive games” like “Putin Bingo” to encourage opposition to the Russian government and exploit “frustrations experienced by Russians in the EU.”

Albany pitched a Latvia-based outlet called Meduza as “a leading proponent of these games.” A top website among Russian opposition supporters, Meduza has received financial support from the Swedish government and several billionaire-backed pro-NATO foundations.

As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot.

One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokno, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolonko trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”

Besides delivering “targeting support” for “independent” outlets pushing the right line against the Kremlin, Zinc proposed leveraging UK FCO funding into a program of direct payments and gaming Google search results in their favor. The intelligence cut-out was explicit about its desire to reduce the search visibility of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT.com.

The UK covertly funded and managed a network of Russian YouTubers and “activated” anti-government protest content

In a document marked “private and confidential,” Zinc revealed the Consortium’s role in setting up a “YouTuber network” in Russia and Central Asia designed to propagate the message of the UK and its NATO allies.

According to Zinc, the Consortium was “supporting participants mak[ing] and receiv[ing] international payments without being registered as external sources of funding,” presumably to circumvent Russian registration requirements for foreign-funded media outfits.

Zinc also helped the YouTube influencers “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages” while working “to keep their involvement confidential.” And it carried out its entire program of covert propaganda in the name of “promoting media integrity and democratic values.”

Perhaps the most prominent Russian YouTube influencer is Alexei Navalny, a previously marginal nationalist opposition figure who was nominated for a Nobel Prize after becoming the target of a high-profile poisoning incident that brought relations between Russia and the West to its post-Cold War nadir.

The Russian government’s sentencing of Navalny to a 2.5-year prison term for evading parole has inspired the largest wave of anti-government protests since 2018, when Navalny helped sponsor national demonstrations against the banning of the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

In its bid for a UK FCO contract, Zinc revealed that it played a behind-the-scenes role “to activate a range of content within 12 hours of the recent telegram protests.” Whether those activities involved Navalny or his immediate network was unclear, but the private disclosure by Zinc appeared confirm that British intelligence played a role in amplifying the 2018 protests.

Russian intelligence services have released sting video footage showing Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Navalny’s FBK anti-corruption organization, meeting in 2013 with a suspected British MI6 agent named James William Thomas Ford, who was operating out of the British embassy in Moscow. During the rendezvous, Ashurkov can be heard asking for 10 to 20 million dollars to generate “quite a different picture” of the political landscape.

In 2018, Ashurkov’s name appeared in leaked documents exposing a covert, UK FCO influence network called the Integrity Initiative. As The Grayzone reported, the Integrity Initiative operated behind the cover of a think tank called the Institute for Statecraft, which concealed its own location through a fake office in Scotland.

Run by a group of military intelligence officers, the secret propaganda group worked through clusters of media and political influencers to escalate tensions between the West and Russia. Listed among the London cluster of anti-Russian influencers was Ashurkov.

The Integrity Initiative’s military directors outlined their agenda in stark, unequivocal terms. As the leaked memo below illustrates, they aimed to exploit the media, think tanks and their influence network to stir up as much hysteria about Russia’s supposedly malign influence as possible. Since they embarked on their covert campaign, nearly all their wishes have come true.

Bellingcat joins the Zinc Network, allegedly meddles in Moldova’s elections

After Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, he collaborated with the UK-based “open source” journalism outfit Bellingcat to pin the crime on Russia’s FSB intelligence services. Though it is well established that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government entity that supports regime-change operations around the globe, the fact has never appeared in the reams of fawning profiles that corporate media outlets, including Reuters, have published about the organization.

Bellingcat’s role as a partner in the Zinc Network’s UK FCO-funded EXPOSE Consortium may add an additional layer of suspicion about the outlet’s claim to independence.

Indeed, Bellingcat was listed in leaked 2018 documents as a key member of Zinc’s “Network of NGOs.” Among the members in the network was the Institute for Statecraft, the front for the Integrity Initiative.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has vehemently denied accepting funding from the UK FCO or collaborating with it. But after Zinc documents leaked in early 2019, Higgins disclosed that some version of the Zinc proposal had received the green light from the Foreign Office.

Christian Triebbert, a Bellingcat staff member who was named as a potential trainer by the Zinc documents, and who now heads the New York Times’ video investigations unit, claimed the program consisted of benign workshops on “digital research and verification skills.”

What he and Higgins did not mention, however, was that Bellingcat had apparently been dispatched by the Zinc Network to “respond” to the 2019 parliamentary elections in North Macedonia. Stakes were high as the elections were likely to determine whether the tiny country would enter NATO and join the EU. The pro-NATO candidate triumphed, and not without a little help from the British Foreign Office and its allies.

According to the Zinc proposal, Bellingcat provided training to the Most Network, a Macedonian media outlet. It was joined by DFR Lab, a project of the NATO- and US government-funded Atlantic Council in Washington, DC.

After apparently participating in the covert UK FCO-funded intervention in North Macedonia, Bellingcat published an article ahead of the country’s 2020 parliamentary elections entitled, “Russia’s interference in North Macedonia.”

Several Zinc Network documents list Reuters as a member of the UK FCO-funded Consortium media intervention in the Baltic states.

Asked by The Grayzone how Reuters’ participation in UK FCO-funded programs aimed at countering Russia conformed to the news organization’s Trust Principles, spokesperson Jenny Vereker stated, “This funding supports our independent work to assist journalists and journalism all over the world, as part of our mission to strengthen a free and vibrant global media ecosystem to support a plurality of voices and preserve the flow of accurate and independent information. This is because accurate and balanced news coverage is a crucial pillar of any free, fair and informed society.”

In recent years, the BBC and Reuters have played an increasingly aggressive part in demonizing the governments of countries where London and Washington are seeking regime change. Meanwhile, high-profile online investigative outlets like Bellingcat have sprouted up seemingly overnight to assist these efforts.

With the release of the UK FCO documents, questions must be raised about whether these esteemed news organizations are truly the independent and ethical journalistic entities they claim to be. While they hammer away at “authoritarian” states and malign Russian activities, they have little to say about the machinations of the powerful Western governments in their immediate midst. Perhaps they are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

thegrayzone.com

An article by the Moon of Alabama (MoA) blogger, on February 5th, decimated the credibility of two American newspapers in just that one shot. It was aptly headlined “New York Times Editors Lie, Obfuscate Facts, To Reinforce Their False Russia Narrative”. The following commentary will presume the reader has already read it, because this is a commentary upon his commentary, which was a brilliant (though I shall also note, imperfect) analysis. So, that article should be read first, because the following builds upon it.

His central point — documented by links to sources that are vastly more credible than either of those U.S. ‘news’papers is — pertains to the vicious distortions in the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media concerning Alexei Nalvany, a Russian politician who back in 2012 got caught by Russia’s equivalent of America’s FBI having Navalny’s top aide try to persuade a person he thought to be an MI6 (UK’s CIA) agent that MI6 should annually donate tens of millions of dollars to Navalny’s organization because doing this would provide billions of dollars of benefit to UK corporations if Navalny would then succeed and become Russia’s leader. How much reporting about that videoed conversation is there in ‘news’-media such as the New York Times and Washington Post?  None. Is that because American audiences wouldn’t be interested in seeing and hearing that conversation between a Russian politician’s right-hand man and a person he thought represented MI6? (After all, Navalny is all over America’s ‘news’-media these days.) Or is it instead because America’s major ‘news’-media are still propagandists for the U.S. Government, against what it — that Government by America’s billionaires — designates to be America’s ‘enemies’?

What would have happened if, say, a candidate for the U.S. Presidency had, years ago, been caught seeking financial backing from a Russian spy, and his right-hand man had told the spy that Russia’s providing help to that U.S. politician’s campaign would be enormously beneficial for Russians “who have billions at stake” in regime-change in America? Would that politician likely be tried for treason in America? Why isn’t this question being debated — not even being raised — in America? Is this a “free press,” or is it a government-controlled press — a press that’s controlled by the country’s billionaires (of both Parties), who also fund the political parties and who want Russia to be effectively controlled again by agents of the U.S. Government as had been the case between 1990 and 2000? (After all, during 1953-1979, America backed Iran’s Government, but after ‘we’ lost it in 1979, America has — yet again — been trying for “regime-change” there. America’s billionaires, once they grab something and then lose it, become obsessed to get it back.)

Near the end of MoA’s commentary, he quotes from the Times’s editorial, which said that,

The opposition [the Times pretending here that Navalny is “the opposition” instead of one of many political opponents of the current Government, and not even a dominant one] now has 40 offices across Russia, and most of its millions of followers are young people who have not challenged the Kremlin before. Among people ages 18 to 24, Mr. Putin’s popularity has slid [ https://archive.is/Jd2kK ] from 36 percent in December 2019 to 20 percent.

That link in the NYT’s article is to the Washington Post’s ‘news’-report.

MoA continues by saying, “The last sentence is an outright and intentional lie.” However, actually, it’s merely a blunder, the NYT repeating and linking to a false ‘news’-report by the WP. Then MoA continues further, by saying that, “The link provided goes to a Washington Post story which does not include those numbers.” That statement is erroneous: the WP story does contain those numbers, and it links to this Russian-language news-report from Levada, which doesn’t include those numbers — neither the 20 nor the 36. The liar was the WP, which fabricated the “20” and the “36.” The NYT merely repeated their lie. (Both ‘news’papers do lots of repeating other people’s lies as being, instead, truths or ‘news’. One common way to avoid reporting a given truth is to select to report only lies that have already been published to the contrary of it; and, especially, ‘news’-reporting about Russia does that, routinely, in America’s billionaires-controlled ‘news’-media, such as NYT and WP.)

The English-language version of that Levada poll-report is levada.ru, and it says actually that 18-24-year-olds 51% “Approve” and 46% “Disapprove” when answering to the question “Overall, do you approve or disapprove of Vladimir Putin’s actions as president of Russia?” However, the “Approve” percentage among all voters is shown in this Levada polling-report as being 64% — and the WP doesn’t mention that fact, at all; they instead hide it (a far more important fact) from their readers. So, not only does the WP article lie about both the ‘20’ and the ‘30’, but it ignores the far more important fact that the poll found that 64% of the total sample “Approve” of Putin’s job-performance.

Furthermore: the Levada-poll’s question “Name a few politicians, public figures whom you most trust” got 14 persons named by more than 1% of the 1,616 respondents, and at the top of those 14 was “Putin” at 29%, next “Mishustin” (12%), next “Zhirinovsky” (10%), next “Shoigu” (8%), next “Lavrov” (7%), and next (6th-place, for what the Times calls the leader of “the opposition”) “Navalny” (5%, which is his highest percentage ever). The Washington Post’s ‘news’-report (which was being cited uncritically by the New York Times) asserts only the lie: “Putin’s popularity among people ages 18 to 24 has slumped from 36 percent to 20 percent since the end of 2019, according to December polling by the Levada polling agency.” Those American ‘news’papers are about as trustworthy as they were back in 2002, about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ and his threat of ‘a mushroom cloud’.

On February 7th, John Helmer, the longest-serving foreign correspondent in Russia, did a detailed analysis of this Levada poll; and, at the end, he noted that, “Russian disapproval of Navalny has been growing, however. In September, 50% of Levada’s national sample expressed their disapproval of him; this has now risen [14] to 56%. More than two-thirds of those polled said they had not changed their view of Navalny during the months of intensive publicity. The growth of positive sentiment towards him during this time, according to Levada, has been concentrated in the 18-24 age group and those viewing Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, and other social media.”

On February 1st, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Russia’s equivalent to America’s State Department) issued a detailed 8,000-word “Press release on Russian-German contacts on the ‘Alexey Navalny case’” responding to and largely contradicting statements that had been made by the German Government regarding Navalny, and his alleged Novichok poisoning and the medical treatments he had received for that in Germany. How much reporting about this detailed reply by the Russian Government has been published in the U.S. and its vassal-nations (‘allies’)?

Maybe the New York Times should replace its motto (always a lie), “All the news that’s fit to print”, by “All the lies that fit we print.” Any lie that’s against Russia will “fit.” Always has — probably always will. They (like the WP) have been reliable, in the wrong way.

On January 21st, Felix Salmon headlined “Media trust hits new low” in America, and documented it mainly from the “Edelman Trust Barometer 2021”, which found, for example, that during the prior 12 months, Americans’ trust in media had declined 15% among Trump voters, and 3% among Biden voters. It also found that, overall, worldwide — among the 27 countries that were surveyed — trust in the media was the highest in Indonesia, China, India, and Singapore, and the lowest in Russia, Japan, France, and UK. U.S. was slightly below average — slightly worse than Brazil and Italy, and slightly better than Nigeria and Spain.

What’s especially interesting, in America, where the mainstream ‘news’-media are certainly atrocious, is that there is so much that the media of both Democratic Party billionaires and Republican Party billionaires agree about and propagandize in the same way, so that all of them refuse to report — they censor-out — the same basic truths, and those are always the truths that are the most essential in order for the public to be able actually to understand (in a truthful way) what’s going on. The most important truths aren’t being reported either in Republican or in Democratic ‘news’-media.

theduran.com

(Thanks to John Helmer who, as far as I know, was the first to suggest that Moscow is preparing a treason accusation against him.)

On 1 February RT published a video taken by the FSB of a meeting between Second Secretary Ford of the British Embassy in Moscow, identified by the FSB as an SIS officer, and Vladimir Ashurkov at a restaurant in Moscow. The video was filmed some time in 2012. Ashurkov is the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation; he is presently living in the UK where he sought refuge after being charged with embezzlement. In the video he is making a pitch for financial support to the tune of “10, 20 million dollars a year” not, he assures Ford, “a big amount of money for people who have billions at stake”. In short, invest in us us and, when we take over, we’ll pay you back. With interest. Big interest. In the meantime, perhaps Ford could get him some kompromat for use inside Russia. In a word, he’s trying to sell Russia to a foreign power. Which, by any standards, is treason. Ford is non-committal and merely suggests that Ashurkov look to one of the foreign NGOs that the British fund. (It should be understood that the “N” in “NGO”, is silent like the “p” in “pseudo”.). But, given that the video was made six or seven years ago, we don’t know whether the British or others took up Ashurkov on his offer. But we can be reasonably sure that the FSB knows the answer to the question.

I believe that the publication of this video marks a major step towards the Russian government charging Navalny and his organisation with treason. Note that RT attached to its report a discussion of the famous “spy rock”. Utter nonsense: “alleged… allegedly… allegations”, a “fabrication”, more “pressure against Russian NGOs” RFE/RL assured us in 2006; “they had us bang to rights” admitted a British official in 2012. The FSB has cleverly disarmed the expected cries of fake! setup! lies! and other denials from the West by reminding everyone that it was the FSB that told the truth that time.

Security services hate revealing anything. Their unvarying intention is to hang onto information because a little bit of information can be nursed into a lot of information: a seed revealed is just a seed, but a seed kept and nurtured can grow into a forest. I recommend Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America to show how the ancestors of Russia’s security organisations nurtured every little seed until they grew so big a network in the American government that they were probably better informed than the White House. So, to get them to give up a seed is a big step. It doesn’t happen, as they say, by accident.

Consider what seeds and seedlings the FSB gave up with this video.

The video exposed a man the FSB had identified as British intelligence. They could have marked him, followed his career, noticed with whom he associated, where he went, whom he met. Fed him false information, exposed his network, found others, followed them and, who knows, turned or compromised some. Now, he’s blown and probably won’t go anywhere near the Russian world again. The British will be back-checking his contacts and network and making a damage assessment and probably shutting things down. So, the FSB gave up years of exposure and mapping of networks.

The video also reveals the degree to which the FSB is following Navalny’s organisation. Everyone assumed that it was, of course, but it appears that the surveillance team was waiting in the restaurant. So that gives away another part of the FSB’s modus operandi. For all we know, the restaurant was a favourite place of the Navalny organisation; not any more: they won’t be going there again.

Note how good the sound recording is. That would presumably reveal something about the technology and trade-craft the FSB possesses. I’m sure that, to those who know these things, other details of trade-craft and equipment were revealed as well.

It is an easy deduction that the FSB has more information that it has not revealed: for example whether Ashurkov’s pitch resulted in a sale. (Note that Navalny’s organisation receives a certain amount of funds via the anonymous Bitcoin). Neither has it revealed any other videos of similar sales pitches that one must assume it has. One can only assume that the FSB already has a good case and can trace the money.

As everyone knows, Navalny fell sick on a flight inside Russia and a few days later, wound up in a hospital in Germany saying he had been poisoned with novichok. While the ever-changing story requires the reader to completely suspend disbelief, as usual in the information war against Russia, new variants are rolled out, confident that its targets aren’t paying attention past the headlines that Putin has poisoned someone again. Thanks to John Helmer’s reporting, we know that the doctors at the Charité Hospital found many health problems when it examined Navalny but no evidence of novichok. The novichok “evidence” comes from German and Swedish military facilities which have declined to publish their findings. Navalny, for his part, has several times asserted that Putin attempted to kill him with novichok. So, we have evidence from two civilian hospitals that show no novichok; there are assertions that it was novichok, but they’re secret and come from military sources; Navalny says it was novichok. Does this look like prima facie evidence that Navalny collaborated with foreign intelligence agencies against his country?

Where did Navalny get the illustrations for his video on Putin’s supposed palace? We know that the building is very far from finished because people went to see it. So somebody supplied the faked-up interiors (complete with Putin himself). A Germany-USA production? “in early December, the [German] studio received a request from the United States about whether it had free production capacity. In strict secrecy, work began on Navalny’s film”. Perhaps there’s another charge here, given the expected importance of this “proof” of Putin’s supposed corruption for Navalny’s campaign. (Another silly story for the gullible, by the way: where would he keep his loot and when does he have time to enjoy it?)

The entire Western propaganda structure leapt on the story. I’ll just quote this one thing from the NYT’s resident sage, Thomas Friedman, because of its amusement value:

Putin is not very important to us at all. He’s a Moscow mafia don who had his agents try to kill an anti-corruption activist, Aleksei Navalny, by sprinkling a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok, in the crotch of his underwear. I’m not making that up! Russia once gave the world Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Dostoyevsky, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Putin’s Russia will be remembered for giving the world poisoned underwear.

“Poisoned underwear”, “mafia don”, “he keeps stalking us”. Plenty more where that came from: if it’s Putin or Russia, the accusation is the proof. Vide Biden’s demand that “He should be released immediately and without condition“. Suspiciously like a coordinated operation; perhaps the FSB can actually show connections.

Navalny is the latest in a long line of Western anti-Putin heroes. I’ve been in this business for three decades and I’ve forgotten half of them. Reports on protests that carefully avoid mentioning people who would spoil the narritive. Putin is a “moral idiot“. Lots of poisonings of opponents (is the absence from that list of the long-recovered and now-discarded Yushchenko significant?) and even non-poisonings; but no explanations for why the (almost invariably ineffective) poisons change: dioxin, thallium polonium and now novichok. Protests are always about to bring him down. Endless endless nonsense about Putin himself – too much to catalogue. Russophrenia. And so on and on; the people change – Browder and Khodorkovskiy fade to the background, Berezovskiy gives up, begs to be allowed home, kills himself (they say) – but the story never changes. Pussy Riot was huge until it wasn’t. Pavlenskiy does something in Russia, he’s a hero, same thing in France, he’s arrested. Always a fraudulent election in Russia (Moscow should take a leaf out of Washington’s book and call all such claims “conspiracy theories” and block discussion.) Washington says it had the MH17 shootdown on film, but you can’t see it. Nothing is ever proven but it never stops. The audience is assumed to have the IQ and attention span of gnats: Moscow hacked the U.S. election system in 2016 but in 2020 the system was watertight while Russia was hacking everything else. It’s information war; most of it nonsense from proven liars. Maybe Moscow has had enough. The Biden Administration is full of Russia-baiters all fully invested in the Trump/Putin conspiracy theory; there will be no change; it’s time for Moscow to give up expecting anything else.

Maybe Moscow is going to make an example of the latest Western favourite and charge him with treason and prove it. Maybe that’s why this video was released. It would appear to be a case of “providing financial, technical, advisory or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization . . . directed at harming Russia’s security” as the treason law puts it. A revision of the law that came into effect, as it happens, in the year the video was recorded. Collaborating with foreign intelligence structures to create a poisoning narrative would appear to fit the definition too. How about writing a letter to a foreign head of state asking him to sanction your country?

And more hints of evaporated patience: Moscow handed over to the OSCE videos of Western police beating up protesters – Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, the USA, Finland, France and the Czech Republic – helpfully pointing out “For doubters, we have shown a contrasting model. How they do it and how we do it. Feel the difference”. The message is clear: motes and beams; or, as they like to say in the West, “whataboutism“. Moscow then expelled diplomats from three countries, accusing them of participating in protests.

Washington, London et alia will protest in the usual way with all the usual statements about human rights that they themselves are pretty casual about at home (“Почувствуйте разницу”), but I suspect that Moscow doesn’t care much what its enemies say. In this matter it may well be that the idiotic Navalny poisoning story, coming after all the other evidence-free accusations, was the last straw. And perhaps Beijing’s success in shutting down the equally foreign-inspired troubles in Hong Kong was an encouraging example.

We will see, but it’s another indication that Moscow has had enough. After all, there’s an audience out there that isn’t glued to CNN and the NYT. There’s no chance of changing minds in Washington or London; it might still be possible in Berlin and Paris – Nord Stream II is probably the test – but there are hundreds of millions out there who are listening. Zone B, the Saker calls it.