“What we know is that the nation’s top intelligence official says that the US has evidence that China is conducting biological experiments on its soldiers to enhance their capabilities,” said CIA asset and reporter Ken Dilanian on a recent MSNBC segment designed to keep you nice and terrified of the west’s current Official Bad Guy.

“I was somewhat skeptical about this claim, but when I started poking around I found that private American military experts in the think tank world have actually studied this issue and written about it and they have found that there is ample evidence that Chinese scientists are very interested in applying bio-technology to the battlefield,” Dilanian continued. “Picture super strong commandos who can operate on three hours’ sleep, or a sniper who can see twice as far as a normal person. This is the kind of thing that the Chinese aspire to doing, and you know, it’s problematic because in the west we consider that to be unethical, to tamper with the genes of healthy people.”

Dilanian was referring to a claim made in a freakish screed of cold war smut recently published in the Wall Street Journal by US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe titled “China Is National Security Threat №1”. The piece includes an illustration of a red serpent shaped like the Great Wall squeezing the world in its coils, much like the globe-strangling tentacled beasts traditionally used in propaganda to drum up fears of communists and Jews taking over the world.

Ratcliffe claims that “China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II,” asserting that there are “no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power” and its “efforts to drag the world back into the dark”.

Completely unburdened by any need to provide evidence or even anything resembling subtlety, Ratcliffe lists as reasons we should all be afraid of China’s sinister desire to “subordinate the rights of the individual to the will of the Communist Party” such things as intellectual property theft and the fact that China (like all major nations) often seeks to influence US politics. Slipped in among these mundane and unimpressive claims, Ratcliffe writes that “China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities.”

A claim without evidence made by a spy chief about the world being threatened by Chinese supervillains with extraordinary powers given to them by unethical Chinese mad scientists should of course be dismissed with a scoff and a vulgar gesture. Instead, CIA assets like Dilanian are leading the charge to throw the entire might of the plutocratic media into driving this nonsense as far into western consciousness as possible. This ridiculous story has been picked up not just by Murdoch outlets like The New York Post, but by outlets like The Guardian and NBC as well.

Every day there’s more dehumanisation of Chinese people in the MSM. Today, @adamgabbatt presents Trump appointee John Ratcliffe’s racist ranting undigested.
“China conducting biological tests to create super soldiers, US spy chief says” https://t.co/F8KUnCJc9R

— Anna Chen (@MadamMiaow) December 4, 2020

Truth, as they say, is the first casualty in war. With its emphasis on global narrative control in lieu of conventional military tactics, this is doubly true of cold war.

Painting the Chinese government as a cartoon villain willing to perpetrate any evil to conquer the world and drag it into the darkness, opposed only by the plucky forces of light in our own government, is as transparent a propaganda construct as it gets. If we had an actual news media this idiocy would be called out, questioned and and scrutinized for all the world to see, and the public reminded of the US intelligence community’s extensive history of lying to promote pre-planned agendas against targeted governments.

What we will get instead is a steady stream of increasingly incendiary claims about China being parroted without evidence by the mass media who serve as mouthpieces for the most sociopathic government agencies on this planet. This is because China, like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and the other nations which have resisted absorption into the US-centralized empire, insists on its own self-sovereignty and has therefore found itself in the imperial crosshairs.

There is no evidence that China wants to take over the world. There is only evidence that it wishes to create a multipolar world, which has been the norm throughout the entirety of human history minus the last three decades. People have been told that China is trying to replace America as the global hegemon so many times that they simply accept it as a basic fact, but there is no actual evidence anywhere that the Chinese government has any interest in ruling over a bunch of random foreigners with whom it has little in common.

“One myth I think really that needs to be dispelled is that somehow China is aiming to replace America and going to run the world, and it’s not,” said Chinese venture capitalist and social scientist Eric Li in the John Pilger documentary The Coming War on China. “First of all, the Chinese are not that stupid. The west, with its Christian roots, are about converting other people into their beliefs. The Chinese are not about that. It’s just that–again, I’m not degrading the western culture, I’m just pointing out the inherent nature, the DNA of two different cultures–the Chinese two thousand years ago built the Great Wall to keep the barbarians out, not to invade them.”

Ratcliffe’s screed of sinophobic cold warrior porn includes an illustration of a red Chinese dragon shaped like the Great Wall squeezing the world in its coils, much like the globe-strangling tentacled beasts historically depicted in anti-communist and anti-semitic propaganda. pic.twitter.com/VthDgOXnG4

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) December 5, 2020

Whenever I criticize the US empire’s aggressions toward and propaganda about China my social media notifications are quickly flooded with blithering imbeciles who claim I love the CCP and think it’s awesome and wonderful. I don’t know what species of brain worm makes people think if you oppose western imperialism it means you love the governments who are being targeted by western imperialism, but it would be good if it went extinct. I simply wish to live in a world where armageddon weapons aren’t being brandished about in steadily escalating acts of insane brinkmanship.

There is no sane reason we should have to live on a planet where governments are waving nuclear weapons at each other in increasingly aggressive battles for global domination. There is no reason the western empire and China cannot pursue detente and work to peacefully coexist on this planet. Most of the rank-and-file public you see babbling hysterically about China online are completely unaware of the existence of the word “detente” and don’t even know it’s an option; they’re so saturated in brain-melting propaganda that they think these standoffs which are seeing more and more military buildup near China’s borders are the only possibly course that can be taken.

Well it’s not the only possible course. We humans, as a species, can use the power of our numbers to force an end to the collision course with disaster we’ve been set on by a changing world order meeting with the perverse neoconservative ideology that US hegemony must be preserved at all cost. It absolutely is possible for humanity to live in a state of healthy collaboration with itself and with its ecosystem, if only we can pry loose the fingers of the ruling sociopaths from the steering wheel and turn our world toward peace and harmony.

With the incoming Biden administration being packed to the gills with ravenous China hawks, it is clear that this multi-front cold war and its accompanying propaganda campaign is only going to get crazier and crazier. Be a voice beckoning the world to sanity.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The core of her gripes with her work experience at MSNBC can be summed up by this paragraph from her blog…

“It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would ‘rate.’ The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day,” Pekary said. “Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing. But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done.”

The above describes one major inherent flaw in news media – the drive for ratings, hits, clicks, views, etc. Be it government or privately funded, someone is paying for producers, hosts, writers, reporters, cameramen, and so on, to go out there and find, i.e. create the news. This means that every single major news organization regardless of where it gets its funding from is beholden to the financier. Someone wants to get their money’s worth.

With seemingly no exceptions, this financier is some massive bureaucratic corporation, massive bureaucratic government, or an extremely wealthy individual with an ideological bone to pick, all three of which want to evaluate the results of their investment based on statistics. If one news site gets 1,000,000 visitors per day and another gets 10,000 then from the standpoint of paperwork and stamps it is obvious who deserves to have their contracts extended for another year.

The thing is that a million views does not mean that a million hearts were touched or a million minds were swayed. Bureaucrats love the idea of quantifying something as abstract as “influence” into hard statistics but the effects of news are hard to quantify. Despite having dismal ratings and results the Mainstream Media in the United States still ultimately drives the news narrative inside of America and for most of the world. Meaning that even with terrible results the big objective is still being achieved. On the other hand getting large amounts of hits/views for garbage material about celebrities, diet and other nonsense doesn’t quantify some level of influence.

In many ways news is the original form of clickbait that was happening even before computer mice became a common household item. Shocking events of horror and murder got people to “tune in at 11” to find out. This need to get shock for ratings is the reason why Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and (post football) O.J. Simpson became their own brand of celebrity. If TV channels back then tried to compete against shock with “hard hitting journalism” that is full of nuances in terms of loopholes in the tax code, then they may as well have kissed the advertisers (and thus their stations) goodbye. “Sex sells” as they say and so does shock/violence. And because of this for decades material that attracts attention has gotten priority over information that may be in the public’s interest. This is not a conspiracy but a natural state of being – news needs views.

Screenshot: Fox may be pleased to publish the words of an MSNBC dissident but their site prominently features non-journalism created solely for clicks.

So Ms. Pekary really shouldn’t be too mad at MSNBC for doing what they need to do to survive, because it is impossible to imagine, especially in the private sector, that some news station could work with no concern for ratings/hits/views. Would you invest millions of dollars into advertising on a media source that has zero guarantees of results? If you were a powerful member of government, would you publicly fund news that may actually serve as a means for revolutionaries to rise up against you via propaganda? No, you wouldn’t and this is why things are the way they are. But Ms. Pekary still seems full of optimism.

“Now maybe we can’t really change the inherently broken structure of broadcast news, but I know for certain that it won’t change unless we actually face it, in public, and at least try to change it.”

The only way to really fix this problem would be to somehow finance massive media budgets without the news organizations having any statistical accountability, or perhaps the success metrics of news need to change and be evaluated in some other way. Perhaps if independent polling were to see to what extent the common masses parroted the narratives thrown out by the MSM, this would be a better means of evaluation, because the real mission is to control the narrative. Obviously this is very abstract, and expensive, but it would be a better metric. Then again CNN’s and MSNBC’s narratives are often identical so it would be tough to prove which one took the intellectual territory. Since most of our beliefs on events are in our subconscious it is very hard to measure.

We also cannot forget that most journalists don’t join the profession to write about Madonna’s most recent botched plastic surgery and would prefer to write about something more serious. There will always be a desire within the staff to do something of value because it is really the managers are those who put them in position who care about statistics.

When it comes to governmental and ideological financiers, even if they are not so much concerned with hard data, then they are very concerned with what ideas are being pushed, so the idea that somehow government financed media would free us from the burden of celebrity gossip news, is only partially true. The government wants results also, maybe just slightly different ones that don’t involve advertising.

It also cannot be understated how any organization can have its own culture and Overton Window of what can and cannot be said. Thus a Liberal audience of MSNBC will not be happy to see more balance by dusting off and inviting Bill O’Reilly to come on to denounce the latest Left Wing crusade. Twenty-first century news has a lot of competition which means that playing to a more niche hardcore audience guarantees better results than being fair and balanced winning over no one to your site. People used to go to church to hear confirmation that their views were right, they didn’t go to synagogues, mosques and temples for a second opinion. People are comfortable in their ideological space which is naturally bad for pushing more open-minded narratives in the media.

Screenshot: Putting Rachel Maddow as your lead personality automatically turns of a Conservative audience and Conservatives from applying to work there. This creates a Liberal echo chamber effect at the station.

The sad reality is that former MSNBC producer Ariana Pekary will never find a media organization that is not compromised for hits/ratings/views or to appease the financier directly. This is just not the way the media works, the problem is that the Mainstream Media is presented to the public as if it were the exact opposite. Perhaps the problem isn’t in the MSM but in the public’s perspective. If the average man on the street saw the media as various propaganda sources trying to woo him to their side, rather than preaching “objective truths”, we would live in a more reasonable world.

What she should do is understand that there are forces within media that naturally push it to do things she does not like and try her best to work within the system to make it better rather than giving up. Producers have a lot of ability to get the guests and talking points they want onto the air. She could gently try to nudge MSNBC closer to what she believes is being “objective” or at least get someone on the air who does not consider Donald Trump to be the spawn of Satan.

And this is another problem with the MSM, good people in it get frustrated and give up when it is their tough battle against policy, economic interest and bureaucracy to try to change organizations from within. It would have been wiser for her to say, keep her salary and fight for incremental change rather than writing a blog stating what should be obvious to the intellectually adept readers of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

In short, the ways to solve the problem described by Ms. Pekary would be to…

• See it as a non-problem and an inherent part of working in news media that will never change. (i.e. live with it)
• Try to convince the financing part to give the media organization the freedom it needs to do good work, without relying on tradition view based evaluation. This will be a tough sell for sure.
• Try to provide metrics of success that are not based purely on hits/clicks.
• Have good people remain inside a bad system and push the network in a more moral direction incrementally.

“I guess maybe Bernie Sanders shouldn’t exist,” said billionaire Steve Schwarzman while seated in a library building named after billionaire Steve Schwarzman and promoting a book with billionaire Steve Schwarzman’s face on it.

According to Bloomberg this humble response from the always modest billionaire Steve Schwarzman came in response to a question posed by an audience member about a Sanders tweet in which the Vermont Senator said that billionaires should not exist. The comment was reportedly met with enthusiastic applause.

Blackstone CEO Schwarzman, who has previously compared tax increases on the wealthy to the Nazi invasion of Poland, is an oligarch by any reasonable definition. As one of America’s top individual campaign donorshe is immensely influential; his plutocratic power is so deeply interwoven with the highest levels of government that his book’s 14 pages of acknowledgements describe cuddly relationships with a who’s-who of top US officials, including the last five presidents. According to a recent report by The Intercept, two Brazilian firms owned by Schwarzman “are significantly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention.”

It is very telling that this oligarch sees an equivalence between (A) saying that an elite class should not control such vast amounts of wealth and (B) saying actual people should not exist. What this tells us is that Schwarzman sees being a billionaire as a fundamental part of his identity, making the idea that he shouldn’t control billions of dollars indistinguishable from saying that he himself should not exist. From his point of view he’s just doing the same thing that Sanders is doing: Bernie’s saying the thing that Schwarzman is shouldn’t exist, and Schwarzman is saying that Bernie himself shouldn’t exist. To him they’re the same.

This statement gives us a bit of insight into the way billionaires see themselves as fundamentally different than the rest of us, forming an egoic identity construct out of being a billionaire in the same way a medieval king would form an egoic identity construct out of that position. This anti-billionaire rhetoric is perceived as an attack on their very identity, which is why they are spinning it as though Sanders is calling for the elimination of actual people.

Predictably, Fox News is now trotting out billionaires to defend themselves from this outrageous billionairephobic bigotry, with Home Depot founder and major Republican Party donor Ken Langone receiving a warmly sycophantic reception from Fox’s Mornings with Maria.

“What the hell has he done for the little people?” Langone asked his host Maria Bartiromo. “What jobs has he created?”

Langone went on to detail all the many jobs he’s “created” (read: how many people he’s needed to hire to help him reap lucrative profits from an already existing demand) without bothering to explain what hoarding billions of dollars in offshore accounts has to do with job creation. Exponents of the “billionaires create jobs” argument always avoid this glaring plot hole like the plague.

Again, we see in Langone’s emotional response two things: that he sees ordinary citizens as “the little people” innately different from himself, and that he perceives the push toward greater economic equality as an existential threat.

“If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany,” Langone has said of the rising pushback against wealth and income inequality. “You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”

These outbursts are reminiscent of one we saw a couple of years ago on an MSNBC interview with resort tycoon Stephen Cloobeck, who expressed outrage at the way progressives are using “the millionaire or billionaire word” to discuss issues with class and economic justice, saying he’d instructed Democratic Party leaders to bring a stop to this rhetoric or lose plutocratic funding.

“It is very, very disturbing when I hear the millionaire or billionaire word,” Cloobeck said, as though he was uttering an ethnic slur for an oppressed minority and not a conventional label for a class that effectively owns the US government. “And I’ve told them to stop it. Knock it off.”

We’re seeing this hilarious conflation of economic justice with the persecution of minorities and the elimination of actual human beings more and more often, so we should probably come up with a name for it. I’d like to propose that we label this phenomenon “wealth identity politics”, and it is capitalism’s dumbest turn yet.

It’s especially dumb because the billionaire class has already proven with its actions that it cannot exist without actively working to manipulate governments in a way that undeniably subverts democracy and the will of the people. The debate over whether or not billionaires should exist is long settled. They should not.

A few million dollars will buy you a nice car, a nice house and some nice clothes. A few billion dollars will buy you the ability to control public narratives using media ownership, lobbyists and think tanks, thereby manipulating entire governments and international affairs. Believing that it makes sense to have an elite class which controls this much wealth and power is exactly as stupid as believing it makes sense to have a total monarchy.

Billionaires should not exist, for the same reason that kings and pharaohs should not exist. The leadership of our world should not belong to a class of highly mediocre people who have nothing noteworthy between their ears apart from a knack for accumulating dollars. The ability to amass wealth is not a valid basis upon which to determine who leads us. Our fate as a species should be in all our hands.

medium.com

Let us contemplate what John Bolton, quondam National Security Advisor to US President Trump, had in mind for “restoring democracy” to Venezuela. We are familiar with the first phase: 1) accusations, 2) threats, 3) stunts, 4) “world community” recognition, 5) appeals for coup, 6) sanctions.

1) You know, Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the troika of tyranny. It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of Venezuela. It’d be good for the people of the United States. (January 2019)

2) All options are on the table. (January 2019)

3) After diverting aid needed badly by Venezuelans to Cuba last week (100 tons), and giving away billions of the Venezuelan people’s wealth to Cuba – now Maduro seeks aid from Cuba and China. All while denying the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis and rejecting aid at the border. (February 2019)

4) National Security Adviser John Bolton said on April 30, 2019 that what’s happening “is clearly not a coup” because the U.S. and many other countries recognize opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president. (April 2019)

5) The FANB [Venezuelan military] must protect the Constitution and the Venezuelan people. It should stand by the National Assembly and the legitimate institutions against the usurpation of democracy. The United States stands with the people of Venezuela. (April 2019)

6) Bolton said the U.S. is “sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with the Maduro regime: proceed with extreme caution. There is no need to risk your business interests with the United States for the purposes of profiting from a corrupt and dying regime.” (August 2019)

Despite “corrupt and dying”, Maduro was still in power, still supported by the population, the “burning aid” stunt failed (when you’ve lost even the NYT…) and the Venezuelan military remains loyal. (Irony alert! Washington’s sanctions on Venezuela increased Russian oil exports to the USA and Europe!)

What would Bolton have wanted to do next? (Easy speculation – we’ve seen it before.) A “coalition of the willing” (no matter how artificial), US aircraft attack key targets with “precision” “surgical” strikes; (more strikes added until, à la Serbia, bombing random bridges 200 kilometres away from the supposed target). The bombing and destruction would eventually force Maduro to leave. Enter the “liberators”, the “legitimate National Assembly” takes power, the “world community” recognises “Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president”. With “democracy restored” and “freedom returned” the next stage: “American oil companies really invest[ing] in and produce[ing] the oil capabilities in Venezuela“, privatisation and IMF austerity. Happiness all round: “good for the people of Venezuela… good for the people of the United States”. Is Maduro still resisting in the hills and jungles? A surge or two will take care of that; there’s  plenty of light at the end of the tunnel and the obedient corporate media will bleat that Maduro will soon be gone: March, April, May, May again, August, September (The Latin America version of the Assad Must Go Curse.)

That would have been Venezuela’s fate with Bolton fully turned on. But Bolton has been turned off. Maduro is still in Caracas and the story has tip-toed off the front pages. Although Hollywood leaps to obey its Master’s Voice and Jack Ryan will save us from a nuclear-armed Venezuela.

The war party is accustomed to blame its quagmires on someone else. Iraq was a success until Obama spoiled it:

because Hillary Clinton failed to renegotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed some American combat troops to remain in Iraq and secure the hard-fought gains the American soldier had won by 2009, [the Islamic State] was able to be literally conjured up out of the desert.

Afghanistan likewise: Obama’s Failed Legacy in Afghanistan. Libya is far down the memory hole: an MSNBC special on Libya as the gateway of migrants to Europe never uses the word “NATO”.

To tell the story of Libya’s escalating migration crisis, one must weave together the threads of instability left behind by a toppled dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, and the power vacuum filled by rivaling factions vying to take his place.

But Qaddafi didn’t just topple in a high wind, earthquake or other random phenomenon: NATO decided to topple him and did so – “We came, we saw, he died” cackled one of the architects. But MSNBC wants us to believe that the destruction was an inexplicable random event that nobody could have foreseen. And so, helped by the corporate news media’s goodthink, the war party slithers away from responsibility: Qaddafi “toppled”, we have a problem; nothing to do with us, or NATO, or Hillary. Bad stuff just happens. “The story of how Kosovo hosted an illegal market in human organs began to unfold today in a district court in the capital, Pristina” is so distant in time that only fringe websites talk about it. As to the Ukrainian disaster, news is starting to leak through the complacency membrane: Canadian officials honour Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, angering Jewish groups, Biden involvement, blowback.

With their excuses and deniability clutched in their hands, knowing the complaisant news media will back them up (CNN: Biden and Ukraine is a conspiracy theory), the war party rolls along. The wars start well, given the US military’s immense destructive power, and then bog down: US war-fighting doctrine is hard-wired for failure. Bolton’s Venezuela adventure, had it advanced to the bombing phase, would also have been pimped as a “success” – Guaidó inauguration, selected interviews, toppling of statues and the rest of the package. But Maduro and his supporters would not have given up and there’d be years of patrolling, “precision” bombing (eventually indistinguishable from “carpet bombing” – see Raqqa), door kicking, IEDs, ambushes, training failures. Iraq and Afghanistan again. They, in their turn, having repeated Vietnam.

But Bolton’s Excellent Adventure never got to that point because Trump would not sign off on the bombing stage and so his scheme failed in plain sight. Let us remember what Trump said while he was campaigning: everyone would be better off had President Bush taken a day at the beach rather than invade Iraq; the “six trillion dollars” spent in the Middle East would have been better spent on infrastructure in the USA; NATO is obsolete and the USA pays a disproportionate share; it would better to get along with Russia than not. Bolton, on the other hand, was all in favour of the Iraq war, believed one more war in the Middle East would have been good, thought NATO was great, and Russia terrible. (There’s a rumour that Trump was considering easing the failed Iran pressure and Bolton’s objections led to his firing.)

So why did he appoint Bolton in the first place? A theory: Keep you friends close but your enemies closer. The late Justin Raimondo agrees: “Instead of taking on the neocons directly, Trump embraces them – and we can see the knife go in as this whole scenario plays out.” When it’s clear that everything Bolton had a hand in was a spectacular flop, he’s tossed out of the tent with the knife in his back.

But Venezuela was not Bolton’s only failure in plain sight: his “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran turned out to be much feebler than Tehran’s “maximum”: the strike on Saudi oil production. Note that, despite billions of dollars of weapons, air defence, radars and the like, neither Riyadh nor Washington has any idea of where the attack came from. Whether Iran did it directly, indirectly, at a distance, supplied some or all of the weapons, was entirely uninvolved or any other possibility you can think of doesn’t really matter: it’s checkmate. Lots of entities in the region are friendly to Tehran and so we can know that:

The attack was an amuse-bouche for what Iran

and its many allies could do

if Washington attacked it.

Another Bolton failure. Read his How to Get Out of the Iran Nuclear Deal and note that he assumes that Tehran has no response. The greatest blind spot of the war party is its assumption that Washington always has the initiative and that its targets can only feebly squirm. But Tehran has been on Washington’s hit list for four decades and it hasn’t wasted that time. A war with Iran will, I am certain, be the Last War for the Imperium Americanum because Iran will stop the oil and the world economy will stagger and probably fall. It has outwitted Washington every step of the way. If Trump really is a reader of Sun Tzu, he should reflect on “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle“. The war party overestimates US power and underestimates the enemy’s will. Succumbs.

Returning to Raimondo’s theory, Trump is now in a position to tell the war party “see, we did what you told us to and it was a complete failure”. Will he appoint people in tune with his campaign thoughts? Apparently not, Bolton’s replacement is more of the same: “peace through strength”, US military dangerously weak, Obama “emboldened our adversaries and disheartened our allies” and the rest of the unreflective claptrap.

This is all part of the Mystery of Donald Trump: on the one hand he surrounds himself with the war party, on the other he hasn’t started any wars. (Bolton was fired in Trump’s day 963; by contrast Obama attacked Libya on his day 788 and called for Assad’s departure on day 940.)

But the war party has painted him into several corners.

(How can he get out of the corner? Easy – just blame his “bad advisors” and do it. The Trump haters won’t think any the worse of him and the rest of us will be glad to step away from the endless war and give him credit for deviousness in a good cause. Or, à la Macron’s suggestion, he can surrender while pretending to have won.)

The ridiculous corporate media freakout over Senator Bernie Sanders’ entirely legitimate accusations of pro-establishment bias continues today, with shrill, absurd new headlines like “Sanders campaign continues attacks on journalists” and “Bernie Sanders isn’t sorry” featuring hysterical MSM drama queens rending their garments over the suggestion that plutocrat-owned media outlets could be favorable to the plutocrat-owned establishment.

In response to this cartoonish display of billionaire-sponsored performance art, The Hill’s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjati aired a segment on their online show Rising which is as damning an exposé on the dynamics of mass media empire propaganda as we are ever likely to witness. With startling frankness and honesty, the pair disclose their experience with the way anyone who is critical of the establishment consensus is excluded from mainstream media platforms, as well as the way access journalism, financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer pressure are used to herd mainstream reporters into toeing the establishment line once they’re in.

I strongly urge you to watch the eight-minute segment for yourself, but I’ll be transcribing parts of it as well for those who prefer reading, as well as for posterity, because it really is that historically significant. I will surely be referring back to this segment in my arguments about plutocratic media bias for years to come, because it confirms and validates everything that analysts like Noam Chomsky have been saying about mass media propaganda like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Status quo propaganda is the underlying root of all our problems, and Ball and Enjati have gifted us with an invaluable tool for understanding and attacking it.

After laying out the evidence from some recent examples of bias against Sanders in the mainstream media, former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball (yes, her real name) asked rhetorically, “Now the question is why?”

“Look, obviously I’ve worked in this industry for a minute at this point and journalists aren’t bad people, in fact, they’re some of my closest friends and favorite people,” Ball said. “But they are people, they’re human beings who respond to their own self-interest, incentives and group think. So it’s not like there’s typically some edict coming down from the top saying ‘Be mean to Bernie’, but there are tremendous blind spots. I would argue the most egregious have to do with class. And there are certain pressures too — to stay in good with the establishment [and] to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism. So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too.”

“Look, obviously I’ve worked in this industry for a minute at this point and journalists aren’t bad people, in fact, they’re some of my closest friends and favorite people,” Ball said. “But they are people, they’re human beings who respond to their own self-interest, incentives and group think. So it’s not like there’s typically some edict coming down from the top saying ‘Be mean to Bernie’, but there are tremendous blind spots. I would argue the most egregious have to do with class. And there are certain pressures too — to stay in good with the establishment [and] to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism. So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too.”

“Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run,” Ball continued. “I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”

Many journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement – are completely misinterpreting Bernie’s media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: pic.twitter.com/AgznEp3LB1

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 13, 2019

“Back in the run up to 2016 I wanted to cover the negotiations on TPP more,” Ball disclosed a bit later. “I was told though, in no uncertain terms that no one cared about trade and it didn’t rate. To be clear, this was not based on data but on gut feeling and gut feeling that had to influenced by one’s personal experience mixing and mingling with upscale denizens of Manhattan. I didn’t really push it; maybe they were right. Of course TPP and trade turned out to be one of the most central issues in the entire 2016 election. It turns out that people did, in fact, care. Now this class bias translates into bad coverage of candidates with working class appeal, and it translates to under-coverage of issues that are vitally important to the working class.”

Ball’s co-host Saagar Enjati went on to describe his own similar experiences as a White House correspondent.

“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” Enjati said. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”

“I’ve definitely noticed this in the White House press corps, which is a massive bias to ask questions that make everybody else in the room happy, AKA Mueller questions,” Enjati continued. “Guess what the American people don’t care about? Mueller. So when you ask a question — I’ve had this happen to me all the time. I would ask a question about North Korea, like, you know, war and nuclear weapons that affect billions. Or I would ask about the Supreme Court, the number one issue why Trump voters voted for President Trump, and I would get accused of toadying to the administration or not asking what Jim Acosta or whomever wanted me to ask. It’s like, you know, everybody plays to their peers, they don’t actually play to the people they’re supposed to cover, and that’s part of the problem.”

“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”

“Every time I took that message to ask Trump a question, I knew that my Twitter messages were going to blow up from MSNBC or Ken Dilanian or whomever for ‘toadying’ up to the administration, and it takes a lot to be able to withstand that,” Enjeti concluded.

As we just discussed the other day, Ken Dilanian is literally a known CIA asset. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a well-documented and historically undeniable fact, as shown in this Intercept article titled “The CIA’s Mop-Up Man”. The testimony that Dilanian’s establishment sycophancy affects not just his own reporting but those of other reporters as well via strategically placed peer pressure is highly significant.

For obvious reasons these insider confessions are as rare as hen’s teeth, so we must absorb them, circulate them, and never forget them. I’m still floored and fall-to-my-knees grateful to Ball and Enjati for putting this information out there for the sake of the common good. Our task is now to use the information they provided to help wake people up from the narrative control matrix.

medium.com

Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded. The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

Malcolm discusses the need for congress to pass domestic terrorism laws. @MalcolmNance #AMJoy pic.twitter.com/PWlH85IYF6

— La Femme Nikita (@LaF3mm3Nikita) 4 августа 2019 г.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, notorious liar and propagandist Malcolm Nance claimed that existing laws aren’t sufficient for prosecuting the El Paso shooter, because there are no laws designating his act of mass murder as “domestic terrorism”.

“I think that Congress needs to take up right away a series of domestic terrorism laws,” Nance said. “It’d be very simple: just match them to the words ‘international terrorism’, so that a member of al-Qaeda and a member of a white nationalist terrorist cell or a militia that thinks they’re going to carry out international acts of terrorism are equal all the way around. Right now there are no laws called ‘domestic terrorism law’. They can get you for firearms, they get you for hate crimes, but you are not treated as a terrorist. This act in El Paso was clearly by all definitions a terrorist attack in the United States, but of course by the nature of the person being white and American he can’t be treated like a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda. He can’t even be detained, he can only be treated as a murderer.”

(The accused, for the record, is in fact under arrest currently, and prosecutors say that they are treating it as a domestic terrorism case for which they are seeking the death penalty. This is in Texas; he’ll be dead before the next Fast & Furious movie. Nance’s notion that prosecutors’ hands are somehow tied here is silly.)

“But he’s a murderer with a political intent who is spreading an ideology,” Nance continued. “So Congress should take that up immediately. And let’s see if the White House won’t sign that legislation. That would be very revealing.”

In other words, shove the legislation through and call anyone who opposes it a Nazi lover.

Years of misguided alarmism over “Islamic terrorism” resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to “white nationalist terrorism” is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) 4 августа 2019 г.

Political commentary is flooded with the word “terrorism” today. People are demanding that the El Paso shooter in particular and white supremacists in general be labeled terrorists by the narrative-making commentariat, and you know what? I totally get it. The push since 9/11 to tar Muslims as “terrorists” has been extremely obnoxious and fueled by hate and bigotry, so it makes sense for progressive-minded people to push for the egalitarian usage of that term. But before doing so, please reflect on what lessons we learned from the post-9/11 “Islamic terrorism” scare.

“Years of misguided alarmism over ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to ‘white nationalist terrorism’ is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes,” tweeted independent journalist Michael Tracey in response to the chatter.

“I am telling you now that the government will use the violence that Trump himself has rallied as an excuse for more militarization, more surveillance, more violations of civil liberties — and a lot of people are going to welcome these things because they are afraid,” tweeted Truthout’s Kelly Hayes. “I’m not guessing or being creative here. This is about having a sense of history and a sense of how these systems function in the present. I would love to be wrong. I would celebrate being wrong. But I’m not.”

Indeed, it is an established fact that the US government will use the narrative about the need to fight terrorism to advance pre-existing agendas. The first draft of the massive USA Patriot Act was introduced a week after the 9/11 attacks, far too fast for anyone to have gathered the necessary information from all the relevant government bodies about what changes were necessary and typed out the hundreds of pages of the bill. Legislators later admitted that they didn’t even have time to read through the densely worded bill before passing it the next month, so to believe that it could have been written in a week would be childish.

High-altitude surveillance balloons have been deployed over America to “deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats” via “hi-tech radar”. To be clear, this is not something they’re considering or opening up for public debate. This has already happened. https://t.co/q7IKr5WMLN

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 3 августа 2019 г.

In 2011 then-Congressman Ron Paul told Politico that “the Patriot Act was written many, many years before 9/11,” adding that the attacks simply provided “an opportunity for some people to do what they wanted to do.” Paul was serving in Congress when the Patriot Act was passed. The Act has since been used to erode human rights at home and abroad by destroying Fourth Amendment protections and legalizing Orwellian surveillance, and it’s safe to assume that the opaque and unaccountable government agencies who were greatly empowered by it had already wanted this to happen.

I have no easy answers for America’s mass shooting epidemic, and as an Australian I see the gun control debate as outside my sovereign territory. I will simply suggest, as I so often do, that if Americans really want to address the problem then the best place to start is to do the first ever honest and in-depth study on the effects of domestic propaganda on the American mind, particularly war propaganda. There are only so many times a certain type of mind can be told violence-glorifying lies before it snaps; if anyone researches mass shootings in the light of the constant psychological abuse that Americans suffer at the hands of their mass media, I guarantee they’ll find a connection. Americans are the most propagandized people on earth because of their proximity to the most strategically crucial part of the empire; it’s not a coincidence that they’re also by far the most prone to mass shootings.

One thing I can tell you won’t fix your problems, America, and that’s listening to the propagandists who want you to hand over even more control to a government that has already begun floating high-altitude surveillance balloons over your country without your permission.

Don’t let them bully you with fear.

medium.com

Aaron MATÉ 

The loudest voice among the corporate media hack pack doubling down on Russiagate conspiracies is MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. On May 3, Maddow took her propaganda to an entirely new level of militaristic cheerleading, launching into a rant that offered de-facto encouragement for the current neocon cause-du-jour: regime change in Venezuela.

Maddow not only cast Trump as a Russian stooge for daring to discuss – and possibly de-escalate – the Venezuelan crisis with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the top-rated liberal cable news host expressed sympathy for John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the most militaristic members of the Trump administration.

Since the Trump administration first launched its coup attempt against the government of President Nicolas Maduro in January, Maddow and other conspiracy theorists have done their best to ignore it. For one, acknowledging this brazen coup effort would show their hyperventilation about “the Russian attack on our election” to be a hypocritical farce: it is far more difficult to liken stolen emails and juvenile Russian social media posts to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 when your supposedly “defenseless” country is openly trying to overthrow a foreign government via lethal sanctions, propping up the coup plotters, and trying to trigger a military revolt.Furthermore, the Trump administration’scoup attempt in Venezuela  is yet one more development that undermines the notion of Trump and Putin secretly colluding to destroy American democracy. Indeed, Venezuela is one more site of US and Russian conflict, with Trump presiding over an unprecedented escalation of tensions.

As the Financial Times noted in February, as Russia pushes back against Trump administration attempts to remove the Maduro government through internal destabilization, “it is clear that the US and Russia are engaging in a new sort of proxy conflict in America’s backyard.” Last week, Politico observed that the conflict over Venezuela has become “a proxy battle… [threatening] a return to the tense Cold War years.” The Trump administration’s Venezuela compliments many other dangerous developments – Trump pulling out of the INF treaty; sending arms to Ukraine; seeking to block a German-Russia gas pipeline; increasing U.S. troop deployments to Russia’s borders, and many, many more examples that have simply tumbled down the memory hole.

As I documented in a recent Twitter thread, Maddow has been “leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods and innuendo of the last 2+ years.” Looking back, I should have mentioned that Maddow has also been a vocal promoter of unhinged propaganda that encourages perilous tensions with Russia, and cultivates pro-war opinion among her base of extremely suggestible liberal viewers.

When Maddow finally broke her silence on Venezuela, it was on May 3, after Trump held a phone call with Putin to discuss, among other things, lowering the temperature on Venezuela. The diplomatic contact between two world leaders should have been considered routine, but in the feverish world of liberal conspiracism, it was another opportunity for hallucinatory claims of collusion and the posting of homophobic Trump-Putin memes on social media.

After a week of saber-rattling by Washington and a failed, violent coup attempt in Caracas, Maddow launched into an indignant pro-war diatribe:

Maddow: “Even though his whole administration spent all week saying that Russia was interfering in Venezuela, and propping up the Venezuelan dictator there, turns out President Trump now says: Putin isn’t doing that at all, because Putin told him so.

…And so, hey John Bolton and hey Mike Pompeo, are you guys enjoying your jobs right now? You each thought your job this week was to name, and shame, and threaten, and counter Russian government involvement in Venezuela while saber-rattling about how everybody else better get out of the way because the US is really mad about it. Guys, turns out your actual job is figuring out how and why you work for a president who says whatever Vladimir Putin tells him.”

Maddow went on to offer empathy for National Security Advisor John Bolton, noting that he had just told CNN this week that “the Russians like nothing better than putting a thumb in our eyes” and that their “behavior is unacceptable to us.” Maddow went on to mock Bolton – not for his hawkishness – but for the public incongruity between his stance and President Trump:

How do you come to work anymore if you’re John Bolton? pic.twitter.com/gYfuZANiaS

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) 4 May 2019

Maddow: Yeah, you though that was your job. But not all. Not after Vladimir Putin gets done with President Trump today…. This is who you’re working for. You thought your job was to push Russia back because of what they’re doing in Venezuela. The president spent an hour on the phone with Vladimir Putin today. Putin told him he’s not in Venezuela so now the new position of the U.S. government in Venezuela.

Trump’s conciliatory comments track with accounts that have emerged of him being out of step with his top officials’ push for a coup in Venezuela. Trump, CNN reports, has been “expressing frustration that some aides are more openly teasing military intervention” in Venezuela. He has also “privately express[ed] concern over how solid [coup leader Juan] Guaido’s plans are to take power and win support from Venezuela’s military,” and has begun to “ask questions about the reliability of US intelligence that suggested senior members of Maduro’s inner circle were preparing to defect.”

Whether accounts of Trump’s second-guessing are correct or not, it is one more indictment of the delusional Russiagate media culture that one of its leading voices, Maddow, is actually discouraging a peaceful outcome in Venezuela, rather than welcoming moves towards de-escalation.

After two years of unhinged rhetoric and baseless conspiracy theories, Maddow seems increasingly eager to see the new Cold War turn hot.

thegrayzone.com

Headlines were blaring the word “Russian” again the other day because the mass media narrative managers found yet another reason for westerners to feel terrified of the icy potato patch that we’d barely ever thought about prior to 2016. I’d like to talk about the Kremlin’s latest horrifying horrific addition to its fearsome doomsday artillery, and recap a few of the other incredibly frightening and terrifying tactics that those strange Cyrillic-scribbling demons of the East are employing to undermine truth, justice, and the American way. Just to make sure we’re all good and scared like we’re supposed to be.

Gather the kids, clutch your pearls and sign off on hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending, my patriotic brethren! Here are five super scary ways the Red Menace is trying to destroy you and everything you hold dear:

1. Whales

Is this beluga whale actually a Russian spy? https://t.co/GC8hYIuH7J

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) 29 апреля 2019 г.

Headlines and TV news segments from virtually all mainstream outlets were falling all over themselves the other day to report the fact that some Norwegians found a tame beluga whale with a harness on it, and “experts” attest that the animal may have been part of a covert espionage program for the Russian navy.

While there is no indication that this spying cetacean has been trained in the arts of sonar election meddling or shooting novichok from its blowhole, the Guardian helpfully informs us that the harness was labeled “Equipment of St. Petersburg”, and was equipped to hold “a camera or weapon”.

“Marine experts in Norway believe they have stumbled upon a white whale that was trained by the Russian navy as part of a programme to use underwater mammals as a special ops force,” the Guardian reports.

The Norwegian tabloid Verdens Gang, which picked up on the discovery well before the breathless English headlines began gracing us with their presence, is a teensy bit less Ian Flemingesque in its reporting on the matter: the harness is equipped for a GoPro camera. The words “Equipment of St. Petersburg” are written in English.

Why is the Russian military writing “Equipment of St. Petersburg” in English on the garments of its aquatic special ops forces, you may ask? If there were indeed a secret beluga espionage squad assembled by Russian intelligence services, would they not perhaps avoid writing the home address of the whales on their harnesses altogether, and maybe, you know, not let them run free in the wild?

And to that I would say, stop asking so many questions. That’s just what Putin wants.

2. Crickets

NBC and MSNBC Blamed Russia for Using “Sophisticated Microwaves” to Cause “Brain Injuries” in U.S. “Diplomats” in Cuba. The Culprits Were Likely Crickets. https://t.co/7G8p0PyCKI

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) 7 января 2019 г.

A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials last September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being “sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon” from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted.

The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers once heard some horny crickets in Cuba.

*cough*

3. Puppies

Robert Parry explores the strange mystery of the Russia-gate puppies, https://t.co/XL9pxJW4E8

— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) 4 октября 2017 г.

Ye gads, is is nothing sacred? Is there any weapon these monsters won’t use to transform the west into a giant, globe-spanning Mordor?

That’s right, in 2017 puppies became one of the many, many things we’ve been instructed to fear in the hands of our vodka-swilling enemy to the east, with mass media outlets reporting that a Facebook group for animal lovers was one of the sinister, diabolical tactics employed by St. Petersburg’s notorious Internet Research Agency. As the Moon of Alabama blog has explained, the only evidence we’ve seen so far actually indicates that the Internet Research Agency’s operations in America served no purpose other than to attract eyeballs for money. As journalist Aaron Maté wrote of the highly publicized Russian Facebook meddling, “Far from being a sophisticated propaganda campaign, it was small, amateurish, and mostly unrelated to the 2016 election.”

The late, great Robert Parry, one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Russiagate narrative, covered this one for Consortium News in an article he authored a few months before his untimely passing:

As Mike Isaac and Scott Shane of The New York Times reported in Tuesday’s editions, “The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. … There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.”

Now, there are a lot of controversial issues in America, but I don’t think any of us would put puppies near the top of the list. Isaac and Shane reported that there were also supposedly Russia-linked groups advocating gay rights, gun rights and black civil rights, although precisely how these divergent groups were “linked” to Russia or the Kremlin was never fully explained. (Facebook declined to offer details.)

At this point, a professional journalist might begin to pose some very hard questions to the sources, who presumably include many partisan Democrats and their political allies hyping the evil-Russia narrative. It would be time for some lectures to the sources about the consequences for taking reporters on a wild ride in conspiracy land.

Yet, instead of starting to question the overall premise of this “scandal,” journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, etc. keep making excuses for the nuttiness. The explanation for the puppy ads was that the nefarious Russians might be probing to discover Americans who might later be susceptible to propaganda.

“The goal of the dog lovers’ page was more obscure,” Isaac and Shane acknowledged. “But some analysts suggested a possible motive: to build a large following before gradually introducing political content. Without viewing the entire feed from the page, now closed by Facebook, it is impossible to say whether the Russian operators tried such tactics.”

4. Pokémon

Yes, Pokémon.

This Russia hysteria has been a long, wild ride, and sometimes it’s honestly felt like they’re just experimenting on us. Like they’ve been testing the limits of how ridiculous they can make this thing and still get mainstream Americans to swallow it. Like the establishment propagandists are all sitting around in a room smoking blunts and making bets with each other all,
“I’m telling you, we can sell a Pokémon Go Kremlin conspiracy.”
“Do it!”
“No way. There’s no way they’ll go for it.”
“Yeah well you said that about the puppy dogs!”

And then they release their latest experiment in social manipulation and place bets on how many disgruntled Hillary voters they can get retweeting it saying “God dammit, I knew that jigglypuff looked suspicious!”

The October 2017 CNN report which sparked off a full day of shrieking “OMG THEY’RE EVEN USING PIKACHU TO ATTACK OUR DEMOCRACY” headlines was titled “Exclusive: Even Pokémon Go used by extensive Russian-linked meddling effort”, and it reported that Russia had extended its “tentacles” into the popular video game for the purpose of election meddling. Apparently the Internet Research Agency attempted to hold a contest using the game to highlight police brutality against unarmed Black men, which of course is something that only an evil autocracy would ever do.

Not until the fifteenth paragraph of the article did we see the information which undercut all the frantic arm flailing about Russians destroying democracy and warping our children’s fragile little minds:

“CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”

Mmm hmm.

5. Laughter

Turns out jokes are a Russian disinformation conspiracy.
Is nothing safe? What will those barbarian Others think of next? Weaponizing our tears? https://t.co/0CFcTL65q0

— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) 15 декабря 2018 г.

Late last year the BBC published an article titled “How Putin’s Russia turned humour into a weapon” about yet another addition to the Kremlin’s horrifying deadly hybrid warfare arsenal: comedy. The article’s author, ironically titled“Senior Journalist (Disinformation)” by the BBC, argues that Russia has suddenly discovered laughter as a way to “deliberately lower the level of discussion”.

“Russia’s move towards using humour to influence its campaigns is a relatively recent phenomenon,” the article explained, without speculating as to why Russians might have suddenly begun laughing at their western accusers.

Is it perhaps possible that Russian media have begun mocking the west a lot more because westerners have made themselves much easier to make fun of? Could it perhaps be the fact that western mass media have been doing absolutely insane things like constantly selling us the idea that the Kremlin could be lurking behind anything in our world, even really innocuous-looking things like puppy dogs, Pokémon and whales? Could we perhaps be finding ourselves at the butt end of jokes now because in 2016 our society went bat shit, pants-on-head, screaming-at-passing-motor-vehicles insane?

Nahhh. Couldn’t be. It’s the Russians who’ve gone mad.

medium.com

Resume: Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

After more than a year since we first heard the BBC “breaking news” about the “Russians Poisoning the Skipals”, all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government’s bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia. Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the “evidence”, presented in the usual clipped, “authoritative” British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC “journalist” and the two “experts”, colluded to transform false allegations into “facts”… fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our “special US-UK relationship”, Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny “cell” at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, “Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy” by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated “by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media” (preface p. XIII)

Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria” (2017). There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization” goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, “Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World”. Therein, Lifton states: “More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims.” (p.3) And Mettan’s analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations “realist” in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: “The Roots of Liberal Hegemony”, “The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony” and “The Case for Restraint”: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/john-j-mearsheimer-liberal-ideals-and-interntional-realities with his book, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities” published in 2018.

But what about “Russian Aggression” in Ukraine & Crimea?

In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated “facts”.

Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa’s book, “Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order”, 2017, we turn to the section on “Reality Wars and American Power” on p. 217 to read: “It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes.” And he continues on p. 218: “Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks.” Adding that these “are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today.”

Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now; we create our own reality.”

[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush—identified later as Karl Rove, Bush’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff—told him, “We’re an empire now, we create our own reality.”]

Thus, we’ve become trapped in a contrived “reality” promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal “democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists” to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable “Liberal World Order”. However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: “If a foreign power is considered to have violated ‘international order’, then it can be overthrown” as a rationale for American “regime change” anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico…as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our “Bay of Pigs” invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great…except for an interval in the ’50s when Crimea was” gifted” to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

“Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia”

And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over “the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media.” And he went on to say that “the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

“That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

“The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian ‘Westernizers’ and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.

“He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered.” Mettan, pp. 15-16 in “Creating Russophobia”.

Russophobia: akin to Racism

From another perspective: Mettan’s chapter on “German Russophobia” set me thinking that this “Western Supremacy” political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and “justifications” in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?…that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside…and found a book in the library: “South of Freedom” by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down…at least in my mind.

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

So, here’s a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy… and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe’s neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. These are not poor “niggers” from the Eurasian ghetto we’ve been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of “The Liberal World Order” dominated by US; they’re nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules…nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged “Russian poisoning” was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness…with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media…led by the once esteemed BBC. And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba’s war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”, Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists…were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers’ war propaganda.

Regime Change Comes Home

Never-the-less, after a very long run of American “regime change” abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil…on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile…to name a few of our interventions…we were back for a second round with “coalitions of the willing” or not? in the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya…before breaking down in Syria. Until now it’s been brought home again, renovated and renamed “RussiaGate” for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, “Felt”, another “Watergate” re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between “Felt” and Mueller? And despite the media’s commemoration of its 44-year-old “moment of courage” with the movie “The Post” to promote Trump’s ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to “regime change”, didn’t the our “ruling elite” read Jane Mayer’s “The Danger of President Pence” in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s’ “ruling class” was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew…before “regime changing” Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

A Florentine Epiphany

But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a “heretic”, during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under “villa arrest”, from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: “The world does not turn on an American axis!”

The 21^st Century Inquisition

So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers…such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age “Solzhenitsyn?” in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our “justice” system for revealing our government’s surveillance of US! 

Any Good Sense Left?

So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.”

“Walden” 1854

If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony “for, by & of the people” NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.