Luke Harding is de schrijver van het boek: ‘Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win’, ofwel deze fantast heeft een heel boek geschreven over de zogenaamde hulp van Rusland voor Trump………..Harding heeft in de titel van zijn boek de woorden ‘dirty money’ gebruikt, die had hij beter kunnen gebruiken voor het kopen van de VS presidentsverkiezingen door de grote bedrijven!!
Russiagate, een complottheorie waarmee men stelt dat Rusland Putin het presidentschap zou hebben bezorgd, is uit en te na met bewijzen van het tegendeel de grond in geschreven, maar dat deert Harding blijkbaar niet, nee hij gaat verder met deze en andere leugens dat Putin Donald Trump onder de duim zou hebben gehouden en zo diens beleid t.a.v. Rusland zou hebben gemanipuleerd, dit heeft hij in een boek gedaan en in een artikel in The Guardian….. Lullig genoeg propageert niet alleen The Guardian deze leugen, maar zoals al zo vaak op deze plek opgemerkt: zo ongeveer de hele westerse massamedia……. Het is voor deze media, die al lang niets meer met onafhankelijke journalistiek te maken hebben, dan ook zaak om eerdere leugens niet te rectificeren, maar te blijven herhalen en zelfs elke nieuwe leugen die de eerdere leugens levend houden te omarmen, sterker nog:deze media komen zelf maar al te vaak met nieuwe leugens over deze zaak….. Dit gaat niet alleen op voor de manipulatie van Trump, maar voor vele andere zaken…..
Misschien is er één uitzondering op het voorgaande en dat is de illegale oorlog tegen Irak, niet dat men nu stelt dat deze oorlog onterecht was, echter de vuile leugen over de massavernietigingswapens die het Iraakse bewind van Saddam Hoessein zou hebben gehad (de hoofd reden voor die illegale oorlog), wordt niet meer herhaald, niet voor niets daar deze wapens niet werden gevonden, iets dat VN wapeninspecteur Blix al ruim voor die oorlog aan iedereen heeft uitgelegd die het maar horen wilde…… Nee men stelt nu onomwonden dat deze oorlog terecht was omdat daarmee ‘het verschrikkelijke bewind’ van Hoessein werd beëindigd, zonder te melden hoeveel Irakezen werden vermoord in deze illegaal door de VS gevoerde oorlog: 2,4 miljoen!!* Veel meer doden dan door de terreur van Hoessein zijn gevallen…..
Harding schreef dus ook een artikel in The Guardian over de Russische manipulatie van Trump, een nieuwsmedium dat zo af en toe nog met een onafhankelijk bericht komt en daarmee bijvoorbeeld terechte kritiekuit**, echter met het boek en artikel van Harding wordt weer eens korte metten gemaakt met elke onafhankelijkheid……. Zelfs al heb je je niet verdiept in Russiagate en de andere leugens over Russische manipulatie van het VS regeringsbeleid, moet je toch kunnen zien dat Trump allesbehalve een vriend was van Rusland en Putin in het bijzonder: Trump voerde een veel harder beleid tegen Rusland dan zijn voorganger Obama en zijn opvolger Biden nu (al was Biden eerder ook verantwoordelijk voor het beleid t.a.v. Rusland, daar hij vicepresident was onder Obama). Alleen al de sancties die Trump tegen Rusland invoerde zijn een bewijs van de grote vijandigheid van de Trump administratie t.o.v. Rusland……
Een voorbeeld in het verlengde van het voorgaande is de aanleg van de Nord Stream 2 (NS2) gaspijpleiding van Rusland naar Duitsland: onder Trump werden de bedrijven die hier aan meewerkten bedreigd met sancties, de Trump administratie voerde de druk op Duitsland steeds verder op te stoppen met dit project, terwijl Biden deze pijpleiding nu als een gegeven ziet (plork Blinken, de huidige VS minister van BuZa, sputterde dit jaar nog een paar keer tegen, maar daar bleef het bij)
Caitlin Johnstone schreef een artikel over deze zaak, daar de media in de VS en Groot-Brittannië de leugens van Harding brengen als zou men definitief bewijs hebben dat Trump niet alleen het presidentschap won door machinaties van Rusland, maar ook dat Putin Trump zou hebben gechanteerd met kennis over
Trump die hem zouden hebben beschadigd bij openbaring…… ha! ha! ha!
ha! ha! Vraag: waarom heeft Putin die dan niet gebruikt toen Trump
Rusland steeds meer sancties oplegde ???!!! Kortom gelul van een dronken
aardbei!!
Reken gerust dat de leugens van Harding binnenkort in ons land zullen worden aangehaald, immers ook hier houden de reguliere media en politiek de leugen levend dat Putin Trump de verkiezingszege bracht en hem zou hebben gemanipuleerd, waarbij men elk zogenaamd bewijs daarvoor gretig publiceert respectievelijk ventileert, daar men dondersgoed weet dat men deze leugens heeft gebracht maar dat niet wil toegeven…. Dat Harding leugens vertelt in zijn boek en het Guardian artikel wordt nog eens duidelijk uitgelegd in het schrijven van Caitlin:
Collusion
author Luke Harding continues to receive mainstream traction authoring
stories which generate headlines in influential media outlets around the
world promoting his theory that Trump conspired with the Kremlin,
despite the fact that both he and his theory have been completely and
utterly discredited many times over.
The Guardian has published an article
co-authored by Harding on “what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin
documents” which “suggest” that Russian officials had a conversation
which delivers “apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses kompromat, or potentially compromising material, on the future president.”
“The
paper refers to ‘certain events’ that happened during Trump’s trips to
Moscow,” says Harding with his two co-authors. “Security council members
are invited to find details in appendix five, at paragraph five, the
document states. It is unclear what the appendix contains.”
“Russia’s
three spy agencies were ordered to find practical ways to support
Trump, in a decree appearing to bear Putin’s signature,” the article
reads, adding, “Western intelligence agencies are understood to have
been aware of the documents for some months and to have carefully
examined them. The papers, seen by the Guardian, seem to represent a
serious and highly unusual leak from within the Kremlin.”
Note
the highly qualified language, an ever-present phenomenon in the thinly
sourced Russiagate stories we were inundated with throughout the
entirety of Trump’s presidency: “suggest”, “assessed to be”, “apparent”,
“appearing to”, “seem to”.
Also
note how Harding and company do not know what’s in the appendix
referenced which supposedly elaborates on their most incendiary claim.
Also note how “Western intelligence agencies” are the authoritative sources behind these claims.
Beyond this, the actual document provided by The Guardianhas come under scrutiny for containing numerous linguistic errors unlikely to have been made by native Russian speakers.
Then
there’s the little itty bitty problem that the president who the
authors claim was beholden to the Kremlin via kompromat was indisputably far more hawkish toward Moscow than both the president who preceded him and the president who replaced him. If Kremlin intelligence did indeed compromise Trump with blackmail, a claim for which the Mueller investigation found no evidence, then it was a very poor investment indeed as it clearly had no impact on US foreign policy.
But
the most damning evidence of all against this claim is the fact that
serial fabulist Luke Harding had anything to do with it.
This is after all the same reporter who authored The Guardian’s notorious 2018 claim
that Trump crony Paul Manafort had meetings with Julian Assange in the
Ecuadorian embassy, an evidence-free claim that was clearly false from the moment it was published and discredited even further by the fact that the Mueller investigation found no evidence for it. The same author who was involved in publishing a WikiLeaks password
which led to unredacted documents becoming public. The same author who
was humiliatingly incapable of substantiating his allegations of
Trump-Russia collusion when he finally encountered an interviewer who challenged him to defend the titular claim in his book, Collusion.
Luke
Harding should not be able to find employment anywhere more influential
than the far side of a cashier’s counter, yet here he is still getting
his ridiculous stories published by one of the most influential news
media outlets in the English-speaking world.
These
articles will generate plenty of clicks, and they will make sure
mainstream liberals maintain their virulent hatred of Russia. What they
will not do is help anyone form a truth-based worldview.
‘The pee tape is real’: Critics claim Kremlin leak confirms ‘every awful thing said about Trump ends up being absolutely true’ http://ow.ly/DdQu50Fwxo9
If
you needed any more proof that western media does not exist to tell you
the truth about the world, there you go. The news in our society exists
not to create an informed populace but to preserve partisan worldviews
which protect the interests of the imperialist oligarchic class.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
** De manier waarop de westerse massamedia hun leugens proberen te verdoezelen >> door ook echt nieuws te brengen, of door kritiek te leveren op een regering of bedrijf die/dat men normaal steunt……
Big
Brother, ofwel deepstate, inclusief media en politiek, zorgt ervoor
dat de burgers in de VS nog het meest begaan zijn met de invasies van
de VS elders, illegale invasies, het begin van de illegale oorlogen die de VS voert tegen landen waar het niets, maar dan ook helemaal niets te
zoeken heeft.
De
enorme berg leugens die de VS al heeft gebruikt om haar
grootschalige terreur te legitimeren, wordt er als het ware door de
reguliere massamedia ingestampt bij de bevolking….. Het gaat
intussen al zover dat er een ‘feitenchecker’* is ingesteld, te weten
Politifact, dat is een platform waar veel VS burgers ‘hun licht opsteken’ over het
gaande nieuws. Wat die burgers niet weten is dat die ‘feitenchecker’ in feite is geïnstalleerd om de leugens in de reguliere media, van meer
gewicht te voorzien, zodat iedereen die leugens gelooft en blijft geloven……
Voor
alle leugens over de illegale VS oorlogen die de reguliere media
brachten over Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië, heeft bij mijn weten niet één
mediaorgaan een rectificatie gemaakt, alsof het de normaalste zaak is
te blijven liegen en dat over oorlogen waarin alleen deze eeuw al 2,5 miljoen mensen werden vermoord…… Het is dan ook niet vreemd dat miljoenen in
de VS en de EU nog steeds geloven dat Saddam Hoessein
massavernietigingswapens had, terwijl dat aantoonbaar niet zo
was…..
Het smerige is dat met een beetje ‘geluk’ deze leugens in de
geschiedenisboeken worden opgenomen, waar al een fiks aantal leugens is te vinden (neem bijvoorbeeld nogmaals de leugens over de
aanvallen van de VS en haar oorlogshond de NAVO op Afghanistan, Irak,
Libië en Syrië….)
Eric
Zuesse heeft een artikel over o.a. het voorgaande geplaatst op Strategic
Culture Foundation, waarin hij uitgebreid op deze zaak ingaat. De VS
als politieagent van de wereld, i.p.v. de werkelijkheid waarin de VS
de grootste terreurentiteit op onze kleine aarde is en waar deze
vereniging van terreurstaten sinds WOII al meer dan 22,5 miljoen
mensen heeft vermoord………
Voorts
wijst Zuesse op de VN, een orgaan dat VS president Roosevelt
(overigens ook een oorlogsmisdadiger) graag installeerde, waar hij
dit orgaan zag als een toekomstige onafhankelijke wereldmacht en niet
een door een staat als de VS geleid orgaan, dat overal waar het haar
uitkomt een oorlog begint en waar een niet volgzame houding t.o.v. de VS al voldoende is,
om als land in de gevarenzone te komen………
Niet
voor niets ook dat Zuesse Oekraïne aanhaalt en de enorme leugens die
daarover al zijn geventileerd, waar het zeker is dat de VS ingreep
met een door de CIA georganiseerde opstand (op initiatief van Hillary Clinton, destijds minister van BuZa in de VS), die moest eindigen in de
coup tegen de democratisch gekozen regering Janoekovytsj, alleen
omdat deze regering vriendschappelijke banden had met Rusland…….. (de kosten voor deze operaties in Oekraïne hebben de VS belastingbetalers maar liefst 4 miljard dollar gekost…..) Voorts kon daarmee de gaslevering van Rusland aan West-Europa worden
getorpedeerd, zodat dit deel van Europa haar gas in de VS zou gaan
kopen……..
Vandaar ook dat de achterlijke boerenlul
Hoekstra, VS ambassadeur in Nederland en kopstukken in de VS (waaronder Trump) een grote bek hebben tegen de EU over het door laten gaan van Nord
Stream 2 (NS2), waarmee Russisch gas via een pijpleiding door de
Oostzee richting Duitsland zal worden vervoerd…… Er gaan zelfs
stemmen op in de VS om de EU en dan m.n. Duitsland daarvoor te straffen…….
Pete Hoekstra, VS ambassadeur in Nederland, met zijn typische ‘intelligente blik’
Dan dien ik nog op te merken, dat de titel de lading niet dekt,, immers ook wij worden dagelijks voorgelogen en dat over dezelfde grootschalige westerse terreur in gebieden als het Midden-Oosten, dit o.l.v. de VS, terreur die door de reguliere media, ook in ons land, wordt voorgesteld alsof we daar liefdewerk doen…….
Zuesse merkt verder op dat het militair-industrieel complex oorlogen nodig heeft (oké, een open deur), ofwel de VS heeft vijanden nodig zodat de winsten van de wapenindustrie, inclusief die voor rollend, varend en vliegend oorlogstuig, kunnen blijven groeien……. Uiteraard is het dan nodig dat het volk achter deze illegale oorlogen van de VS staat en daar ligt ‘een mooie taak’ voor de ‘onafhankelijke’ reguliere massamedia, die hun werk uitermate grondig doen: het hersenspoelen van de VS burgers en hen opzetten tegen de ‘vijanden’ van de VS, die zogenaamd een gevaar vormen voor de staatsveiligheid van de VS…….. (of men stelt gewoon dat een bepaald land zoals eerder Irak [en Noord-Korea] de wil en de middelen heeft om de VS direct aan te vallen; te belachelijk voor woorden, zoals je begrijpt)
Lees het
artikel van Zuesse en geeft het door, tijd dat men ontwaakt uit de
consucoma en de hersenspoelstand van de reguliere media!
How
Big Brother Grips Americans’ Minds to Support Invasions
On
November 29th, Gallup headlined “Democrats
Lead Surge in Belief U.S. Should Be World Leader” and
reported that “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today think the
United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the leading
nation in world affairs,’ up from 66% in 2010. The surge is driven
by Democrats, whose belief in this idea has increased from 61% eight
years ago to 81% now.” This finding comes even after the lie-based
and catastrophic U.S. invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Libya in 2011
(and of so many others, such as Afghanistan, where the U.S. and
Sauds created
the Taliban in 1979).
Americans — now even increasingly — want ‘their’ (which
is actually
America’s billionaires’)
Government to be virtually the world’s government, policing the
world. They want this nation’s Government to be determining what
international laws will be enforced around the world, and to be
enforcing them. Most Americans don’t want the United Nations to
have power over the U.S. (its billionaires’)
Government, but instead want the U.S. Government (its billionaires)
to have power over the United Nations (which didn’t authorize any
of those evil, lie-based, U.S. invasions).
Not
only would doing this bankrupt all constructive domestic functions
(health, education, infrastructure, etc.) of the U.S. federal
Government, but it would also increase the global carnage, as if the
U.S. Government hasn’t already been doing enough of that, for
decades now.
The
leadership for this supremacist craving comes straight from America’s
top, not from the masses that are being sampled by the Gallup
organization, who only reflect it — they are duped by their
leaders. Here is how U.S. President Barack Obama (a Nobel Peace Prize
winner in 2009, for nothing
at all but
his ‘kindly’
but insincere verbiage when
he had been a candidate) stated this widespread delusional American
belief in American global moral supremacy, when addressing the
graduating class at West Point Military Academy, on 28 May 2014:
The
United States is and remains the one indispensable
nation. [Every
other nation is therefore ‘dispensable’; we therefore now have
“Amerika, Amerika über alles, über alles in der Welt”.] That
has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the
century to come. … America must always lead on the world stage.
This
had certainly not been the objective of U.S. President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he set up the U.N. just before his
death in 1945; he instead wanted the U.N. to evolve into a democratic
government of the world, with elected representatives of each and
every one of the world’s governments — to evolve into
becoming the
global international republic —
regardless of whether or not the U.S. Government approves or
disapproves of another nation’s government. The idea on which the
U.N. was founded was not to involve the U.S. Government in the
internal affairs of other nations, not to be the judge jury and
executioner of other governments that it doesn’t like, nor to
dictate what other nations should or should not do within the given
nation’s boundaries. FDR intended that there instead be
democratically represented, at the U.N., each and every nation, and
each and every people within that global government, where each of
these national governments is (hopefully but not necessarily) a
democracy. FDR
was just as opposed to dictatorship internationally, as he was
opposed to dictatorship nationally,
and he recognized that inevitably some governments will disapprove of
other governments, but he was deeply committed to the view that a
need exists for laws and law-enforcement between nations,
on an international level, and not only within the
individual nations, and that each nation is sacrosanct on its own
internal laws. He respected national sovereignty, and opposed
international empire. (This was his basic disagreement with Winston
Churchill, then, and with American leaders such as Obama and Trump
now.) Unlike President Obama (and evidently unlike the vast majority
of today’s Americans) FDR didn’t want this international
government to be an American function, but instead an entirely
separate international governmental function, in which there is no
international dictatorship whatsoever — not American, and not by
any other country. He knew that this
is the only stable basis for international peace, and for avoiding a
world-annihilating World War III.
Barack
Obama rejected FDR’s vision, and advocated for the United
States as being (and even as if it already had been for a century)
virtually the government over the entire world, which “must always
lead on the world stage.” Adolf Hitler had had that very same
international vision for his own country, Germany, “the
Thousand-Year Reich,” but he lost World War II; and, then, when FDR
died, Hitler’s vision increasingly took over iHoen America, so
that ideologically, FDR
actually lost WW II, when Harry S. Truman took over the White House
and increasingly thereafter, until today, when the
U.S. commits more invasions of foreign countries than do all other
nations in the world combined.
Americans (apparently, as shown in this and other polls) like this,
and want more of it. Nobody
else does. For
example, nobody (except the U.S. and Saudi and Israeli aristocracies
and their supporters worldwide, which are very few people) supports
the U.S. regime’s reinstitution of sanctions against Iran, which
the U.S. regime is imposing as the global dictator. America’s
economic sanctions are like spitting into the face of FDR, who had
opposed such imperialistic fascism in the more overtly military form
when Hitler’s regime was imposing it. It’s also spitting at the
U.N.
This
latest Gallup finding displays an increase, but nothing that’s at
all anomalous as compared to the decades-long reality of
imperialistic U.S. culture. For
decades now, Gallup’s polling has shown that the most respected of
all institutions by the American people is the nation’s military —
more than the church, more than the Presidency, more than the U.S.
Supreme Court, more than the press, more than the schools, more than
anything. America is invasion-nation. This is true even
after the
2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis of blatant
lies,
which destroyed Iraq
— a nation that had never invaded nor even threatened to invade the
United States. The American people are, resolutely, bloodthirsty for
conquest, even after having been fooled into
that evil invasion,
and subsequent decades-long military occupation in Iraq, and
after subsequent conquests
or attempted conquests, in Libya, Syria,
Yemen, and elsewhere — all destroying nations that had never
invaded nor even threatened America. Why? How did this mass-insanity,
of evil, come to be?
The
public simply do not learn. That’s a tragic fact. Largely, this
fact results from reality being hidden by the ‘news’-media; but,
even now, long after the fake ‘news’ in 2002, about the U.S.
regime’s having possessed secret and conclusive evidence of
“Saddam’s WMD,” the published ‘history’ about that invasion
still does not acknowledge the public’s having been lied-to at that
time, by its Government, and by the ‘news’-media. So,
the public live, and culturally swim, in an
ongoing river of lies,
both as its being ‘news’, and subsequently as its having been
‘history’. This is why the public do not learn: they are being
constantly deceived. And they (as Gallup’s polls
prove) tolerate being constantly deceived. The public do not
rebel against it. They don’t reject either the politicians, or the
‘news’-media. They don’t demand that the American public
control the American Government and that America’s billionaires
lose that control — especially over the ‘news’-media.
Honesty
is no longer an operative American value, if it ever was. That’s
how, and why, Big Brother (the operation by the
international-corporate billionaires) grips Americans’ minds to
support foreign Invasions. Americans support liars, and it all comes
from the top; it’s directed from the top. It is bipartisan, from
both Democratic Party billionaires and Republican Party
billionaires. National
politicians will lose their seats if they disobey.
A
good example, of this Big-Brother operation, is America’s
Politifact, the online site which is at America’s crossover where
‘news’ and ‘history’ meet one-another. It’s controlled by
billionaires such
as the
one who founded Craigslist.
Millions of Americans go to Politifact in order to determine what is
true and what is false that is being widely published about current
events. The present writer sometimes links to their articles, where I
have independently verified that there are no misrepresentations in
an article. But, like the ‘news’-media that it judges, Politifact
is also a propaganda-agency for the
(U.S.-Saud-Israeli) Deep State,
and so it deceives on the most critically important international
matters. An example of this occurred right after the
U.S. regime had overthrown in February 2014 in a bloody coup the
democratically elected Government of Ukraine, and replaced it by a
rabidly anti-Russian racist fascist or nazi Government on Russia’s
doorstep, a regime that was selected by the rabidly anti-Russian (but
lying that it wasn’t) Obama regime.
This Politifact article was dated 31 March 2014, right after over 90%
of Crimeans had just voted in a referendum, to rejoin Russia, and to
depart from Ukraine, which the Soviet dictator had transferred them
to, separating them from Russia, in 1954. (None of that history of
the matter was even mentioned by Politifact.) The Politifact article
was titled “Viral
meme says United States has ‘invaded’ 22 countries in the past 20
years”,
and it was designed to deceive readers into believing that “Russia’s
recent annexation of Crimea” reflected the real instance of
“invasion” that Americans should be outraged against — to
deflect away from America’s recent history as being the world’s
actual invasion-nation. This propaganda-article said nothing at all
about either Crimea or Ukraine except in its opening line: “A
Facebook meme argues that Americans are pretty two-faced when it
comes to Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea.” It then proceeded
to document that the exact number of American invasions during the
prior 20 years wasn’t 22, and so Politifact declared the allegation
“false” (as if the exact number were really the entire issue or
even the main one, and as if America’s scandalous recent history of
invasions were not).
So,
it’s on account of such drowning-in-propaganda, that the U.S.
public not only respect what U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower
derogatorily called the “military-industrial complex,” but
respect it above even the U.S. Presidency itself, and above all other
U.S. institutions (as Gallup’s constant polling demonstrates to be
the case).
Here’s
the reality: The same group of no more than a thousand super-wealthy
Americans control both the United States Government and the
weapons-manufacturing firms (such as Lockheed Martin), which are
the only
corporations whose only customers are the U.S. Government and its
chosen allied governments.
So, these few people actually control the U.S. Government’s foreign
relations, and foreign policies. They create and control their own
markets. This is the most politically active group of America’s
super-rich, because they own America’s international corporations
and because their business as owners of the military ones is military
policy and also diplomatic policy, including the conjoining of both
of those at the CIA and NSA, including the many coups that they (via
their Government) engineer. They also control
all of the nation’s major news-media, which report international
affairs in such a manner as to determine which foreign governments
will be perceived by the mass of Americans to constitute the nation’s
‘enemies’ and therefore to be suitable targets for the U.S.
military and CIA to invade and conquer or otherwise “regime-change” —
such as have been the lands of North Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Venezuela, etc., at various
times. The
weapons-manufacturers won’t have any markets, at all, if there are
no ‘enemy’ nations that are deemed by the public to be suitable
targets for their weapons. ‘Enemy’
nations, and not only ‘allies’ (or ‘allied’ nations), are
necessary, in order for the military business to produce the most
profits. Overwhelmingly, if not totally, the chosen ‘enemies’ are
nations that have never
invaded nor even threatened to invade the United States;
and, so, in order to keep this Government-funded business (the
war-profiteering and associated international natural-resources
extractions businesses)
growing and thriving, what’s essential is continuing control over
the nation’s ‘news’-media. As Walter Lippmann wrote in
1921, “the
manufacture of consent” is
an essential part of this entire operation. It happens via the media.
Even Germany’s Nazis needed to do that. Any modern capitalist
dictatorship (otherwise called “fascism”) does. The U.S. regime,
being a capitalist dictatorship, certainly does. Physically, Hitler
lost, but his ideology won, he won even as nazism (racist fascism)
instead of merely as fascism, and this racism is shown because the
U.S. regime is rabidly racist anti-Russian (not
merely anti-communist),
and has been so for at least a century. (Maybe it’s what Obama
actually had secretly in mind when he said “That has been true for
the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
And Trump is no less a liar than Obama, and he continues this aim of
ultimately conquering Russia.) They say they’re only against
Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, but Putin shows in all polls of
Russians, even in non-Russian polls, to be far more favorably viewed
by Russians than either Barack Obama or Donald Trump are viewed by
Americans. This is why regime-change-in-Russia is increasingly
becoming dominated by U.S. economic sanctions and military, and less
dominated by CIA and other coup-organizers. The actual dictatorship
is in America, and it requires participation by its
‘news’-media. Demonizing
‘the enemy’ is
therefore crucial. It is crucial preparation for any invasion.
The
United States Government spends at
least as much money on its military as do all of the other
governments in the world combined. Its
‘news’-media (that is to say, the media that are owned by, and
that are advertised in by, the corporations that are controlled by,
the same small group of billionaires — America’s billionaires —
who fund the political campaigns of both the Democratic Party’s and
the Republican Party’s nominees for the U.S. Congress and the
Presidency) may be partisan for one or the other of the nation’s
two political Parties, but they all are unitedly partisan for the
international corporations, such as Lockheed Martin, that America’s
billionaires control, and that sell only to the U.S. Government and
to the foreign governments that are allied with the U.S. Government.
They also are partisan for the U.S.-based oil and gas and mining
international corporations, which need to extract at the lowest costs
possible, no matter how much the given extractee-nation’s public
might suffer from the deal. “Three-fourths (75%) of Americans today
think the United States has ‘a special responsibility to be the
leading nation in world affairs,’” and the actual beneficiaries
of this mass-insanity are the owners of those U.S.-based
international corporations, the military and extraction giants.
Anthony
Cordesman, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies,
headlined on 15 August 2016, “U.S.
Wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen: What Are The Endstates?” and
he said, “Once again, the United States does not seem to be
learning from its past. The real test of victory is never tactical
success or even ending a war on favorable military terms, it is what
comes next.” But he ignored the main reason why these invasions had
occurred. America’s weapons-manufacturers won’t have any markets,
at all, if there are no ‘enemy’ nations that are deemed by the
American public to be suitable targets for their weapons. Cordesman
is there calculating success and failure on the basis of the myths
(such as that the U.S. Government cares about those “Endstates”),
not of the realities (that it craves targets). The realities focus
upon the desires of the owners and executives of the
weapons-manufacturers and the extraction-firms, for ongoing and
increased profits and executive bonuses, and not on the
needs of America’s soldiers nor on the national security of the
American people. Least of all, do they focus upon the needs — such
as the welfare, freedom, or democracy — of the Iraqi people, or of
the Syrian people, or of the Libyan people, or of the Yemenite
people. It’s all just lies, PR. Those invasions served their actual
main functions when they were occurring. “The Endstates” there
are almost irrelevant to those real purposes, the purposes
for which the invasions were, and are, actually being done.
A
task force of senior former U.S. diplomatic and military officials
has come up with suggestions for how Trump could prevent Iran from
taking over what’s left of liberated Syria and fulfill his own
promise to contain Iranian influence in the region.
“Most
urgently… the United States must impose real obstacles to Tehran’s
pursuit of total victory by the Assad regime in Syria,” the
report by
the Jewish Institute for National Security of America states. “Time
is of the essence.”
The
underlying presumption there was that the U.S. regime has legitimate
authorization to be occupying the parts of Syria it has invaded and
now occupies, and that Iran does not. But the reality is that the
U.S. regime is occupying Syria instead of assisting Syria’s
Government to defeat the U.S.-Saud-Israeli invasion to overthrow and
replace Syria’s Government, by stooges
who will be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia,
and the reality is that Iran’s forces there are invitees who are
instead assisting Syria’s Government against the
Saudi-Israeli-American invasion. In other words: this WP article
is basically all lies. Furthermore, the Jewish Institute for National
Security of America is a
front-organization for
the fascist
regime that rules Israel,
and the WP hid that fact, too, so its cited ‘expert’
was a mere PR agency for Israel’s aristocracy. So, this is
Deep-State propaganda, parading as ‘news’.
Americans
actually pay their private good money to subscribe to (subsidize)
such bad public ‘news’papers as that. The billionaire who happens
to own that particular ‘news’paper (the WP), Jeff Bezos, had
founded and leads Amazon, which receives almost all of its profits
from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing division, which
supplies the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department, CIA, and NSA. For
example, “without
AWS and Prime, Amazon lost $2 billion in the 1st quarter of FY18. …
These losses come from Amazon’s retail business. About 60% of
Amazon’s revenue comes from retail and that’s where Amazon is
losing money.” Amazon is profitable because of what it sells mainly
to the Government, but also to other large U.S. international
corporations, and they all want to conquer Syria. None opposes that
evil goal. Although Bezos doesn’t like the Sauds, he has actually
been (at least until the Khashoggi matter) one of their main U.S.
media champions for the Sauds to take over Syria. It’s all just a
fool-the-public game. It works, it succeeds, and that’s what
Gallup’s polls are demonstrating. The public never learns. It’s a
fact, which has been proven in many different ways.
This
reality extends also to other nations, allies of the U.S.
aristocracy, and not only to the U.S. regime itself. For example, on
27 November 2018, a whistleblowing former UK Ambassador, Craig
Murray, who is a personal friend of Julian Assange, headlined“Assange
Never Met Manafort. Luke Harding and the Guardian Publish
Still More Blatant MI6 Lies”,
and he proved that Britain’s Guardian had
lied with total, and totally undocumented (and probably even totally
non-credible), fabrications, alleging that Julian Assange of
WikiLeaks had secretly met (in 2013, 2015, and 2016) with Paul
Manafort of the Trump campaign. The UK, of course, is a vassal-nation
of the U.S. aristocracy, and the Guardian is
run by Democratic Party propagandists (paid indirectly by Democratic
Party and conservative Tony-Blair-wing Labour Party billionaires)
and therefore fabricates in order to assist those Parties’ efforts
to impeach Trump and to dislodge Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour
Party’s leadership. However, each of America’s two political
parties (like the UK’s aristocracy itself) represents America’s
aristocracy, which, like Britain’s aristocracy, is united in
its determination
to eliminate Assange —
they are as determined to do that to him, just as Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud was determined to eliminate Jamal
Khashoggi. ‘Democracy’? This? It is Big Brother.
Only
if the population boycott lying individuals and organizations, is
democracy even possible to exist in a nation. Democracy can’t
possibly exist more than truth does. In political matters, deceit is
always treachery; and its practitioners, whenever the evidence for it
is overwhelming and irrefutable, should experience whatever the
standard penalty is for treachery. Only in a land such as that, can
democracy possibly exist. Elsewhere, it simply can’t.
The only basis for democracy, is truth. Deceit is for
dictators, not for democrats. And deceit reigns, in the U.S. and in
its allied countries. Is this really tolerable? Americans, at least,
tolerate it.
When
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the far-right Rupert
Murdoch’s Wall
Street Journal editorialized
against Obama on 10 October 2009, by saying that “What
this suggests to us — and to the Norwegians — is the end of what
has been called ‘American exceptionalism’.” Little
did anyone then know that after winning re-election upon the
basis of such war-mongering lies from Obama, as that “America
remains the one indispensable nation”,
Obama in February 2014 would go so far as to perpetrate a bloody coup overthrowing
the democratically elected Government of one “dispensable”
nation, Ukraine; and, then, on 28 May of 2014, Obama would be
telling America’s
future generals,
that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable
nation” and that Obama would, in that speech, explicitly malign
Ukraine’s neighbor Russia. He did it, in this speech, which
implicitly called all
nations except the U.S. “dispensable.”
He had carefully planned and orchestrated Americans’ hostility
toward Russia. His successor, Trump, lied saying that he wanted to
reverse Obama’s policies on this, and Trump promptly, once becoming
elected, increased and expanded those policies. Whatever a
deceitfully war-mongering country like this might be, it’s
certainly no democracy. Because democracy cannot be built upon a
ceaseless string of lies.
* Ik wist niet, dit artikel schrijvend, dat er een organisatie bestaat met de naam ‘Feitenchecker’, waar men kan vinden of (nieuws-) berichten echt zijn of zijn opgemaakt met ‘fake news’ (nepnieuws)……. Je snapt het al, een organisatie die vooral de leugens van de reguliere media als waarheid bestempelt en terecht commentaar op die leugens als ‘fake’ neerzet….. Hier het adres: De Feitenchecker (@DeFeitenchecker) Twitter.
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende twee artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
Onlangs
kwam The Guardian met het verhaal dat Paul Manafort contact zou
hebben gehad met Julian Assange in de Ecuadoraanse ambassade in
Londen. Een verhaal dat als onzin werd doorgeprikt met aantoonbare
leugens in The Guardian. Zelfs reguliere mediaorganen twijfelden aan
het artikel.
Blijkbaar
vond The Guardian het gebrachte artikel daarna zelf ook dubieus, daar
men de tekst heeft aangepast, zonder daar echter melding van te
maken. In de aangepaste tekst wordt nu gesproken over anonieme, niet
te controleren bronnen……. De schrijver van het Guardian
propagandistische artikel, Luke Harding, stelde in het artikel dat
Manafort meermaals werd gezien in de Ecuadoraanse ambassade en dat
één keer ‘zelfs met 2 Russen….’
Met het
Guardian artikel toonde Harding zogenaamd aan dat Assange contacten
had met de Russen en dat die na het hacken van de DNC server, de emails van Hillary Clinton zouden
hebben doen toekomen aan WikiLeaks, ofwel één van ‘de
smoking guns’ in het Russiagate sprookje….. Kortom de Russen en
Assange zouden hebben samengespannen om Clinton haar presidentschap
door de neus te boren…..
Uiteraard
gebruiken ook de democraten in de VS het fantasie verhaal van Harding om te
stellen dat Assange en Rusland de presidentsverkiezingen van hen
hebben gestolen, terwijl echte deskundigen en ingewijden uitvoerig
stellen, dat de emails werden gelekt vanuit het campagneteam van
Clinton, waar de naam Seth Rich telkens weer opduikt……
Seth Rich
was medewerker van het campagneteam, hij was zwaar gefrustreerd over
de smerige spelletjes van Clinton en de top van haar campagneteam, om de voorverkiezing in 2016 van Bernie Sanders te stelen…….. Sanders was
de tweede belangrijke democratische kandidaat voor het presidentschap
in de VS. Zelfs Obama gaf toe dat e.e.a door het campagneteam werd gelekt naar WikiLeaks….*
Rich
werd vermoord, kort nadat de mails waren gelekt naar WikiLeaks, volgens de politie ging het om een roofmoord, waarbij Rich vreemd genoeg niet werd beroofd
en zelfs dure sieraden niet werden gestolen…….. De poging om Sanders buiten
spel te zetten is gelukt, zoals we al en paar jaar weten.
Manafort
heeft ontkent dat hij zelfs maar één keer met Assange heeft
gesproken en Assange heeft The Guardian gedreigd met een proces
wegens laster…… De bedoeling in het hele Russiagate verhaal is
dan ook Assange als spion neer te zetten, ofwel hij heeft geen recht op bescherming zoals dit het geval zou moeten zijn met (onderzoeks-) journalisten, waarbij WikiLeaks wordt weggezet als een staatsvijandig
vehikel van de Russen…… Waarmee de democraten dan de schuld van het
verlies van de verkiezingen in de schoenen schuiven van WikiLeaks,
haar oprichter Assange en uiteraard de Russen…..**
Met
artikelen als die van Harding in The Guardian moet de publieke opinie
voorbereid worden op het uit de Ecuadoraanse ambassade zetten van
Assange en de arrestatie van deze journalist, die zich met niets anders dan
zijn werk bezighield, dit in sterke tegenstelling tot het overgrote deel van de
journalisten, die voor de reguliere westerse (massa-) media
werken…….
Deze
media hebben i.p.v. Assange te steunen, een taak van onafhankelijke mediaorganen en hun journalisten, hem zwart gemaakt in de publieke opinie,
waarbij zelfs werd gesteld dat Assange alleen de Ecuadoraanse
ambassade in vluchtte, om publiciteit te genereren…. Gelukkig voor
Assange werd ook die belachelijke claim doorgeprikt, toen per
ongeluk stukken werden gepubliceerd waaruit bleek dat de VS een
aanklacht heeft opgesteld voor Assange en op grond waarvan Assange
een lange gevangenisstraf te wachten staat…….
The
Guardian ging zelfs zover dat het een VN panel met experts
belachelijk probeerde te maken, die stelden dat het totaal
onwettelijk was dat Assange niet zonder gearresteerd te worden de
ambassade zou kunnen verlaten…..
De
schrijver van het artikel hieronder, Jonathan Cook, haalt ook Glenn
Greenwald aan, waar het om de claim gaat dat Manafort Assange zou
hebben bezocht. Deze stelt dat het onmogelijk is om ongezien de
Ecuadoraanse ambassade binnen te komen, daar Londen propvol camera’s
hangt en de Ecuadoraanse ambassade, sinds Assange daar binnen
vluchtte, van alle kanten in de gaten werd en wordt gehouden, niet alleen
door camera’s, de politie, maar ook door journalisten……
Als
Manafort inderdaad in de ambassade zou zijn geweest, volgens The
Guardian 3 keer, in 2013, 2015 en 2016, zouden daar zeker bewijzen
voor zijn…….
Intussen is The Guardian gekomen met een volgens deze fake news brenger nog betere fundering van de (ongefundeerde) beschuldigingen aan het adres van Assange (en WikiLeaks) en zijn zogenaamde verbintenis met Rusland, ook nu weer geen enkel bewijs……. Assange zal en moet hangen en in dit geval door een mediaorgaan dat stelt onafhankelijk te zijn en haar berichtgeving dubbel zou checken….. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Lees het
artikel van Cook, eerder gepubliceerd op Creative Commons en door mij
overgenomen van Anti-Media, waarin Cook verder nog aandacht besteedt aan het nep-journalistenforum Bellincat (daaronder nog een kort artikel en video van een interview van Aby Martin met Randy Credico aangaande de zaak Assange):
The
Guardian Continues to Escalate Its Vilification of Julian Assange
The
Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred
of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.***
(CD) — It
is welcome that finally there has been a little pushback, including
from leading journalists, to the Guardian’s long-running
vilification of Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks.
Reporter
Luke Harding’s latest article, claiming that
Donald Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort
secretly visited Assange in Ecuador’s embassy in London on three
occasions, is so full of holes that even hardened opponents of
Assange in the corporate media are struggling to stand by it.
Faced
with the backlash, the Guardian quickly – and very quietly – rowed
back its
initial certainty that its story was based on verified facts.
Instead, it amended the text, without acknowledging it had done so,
to attribute the claims to unnamed, and uncheckable, “sources”.
The
propaganda function of the piece is patent. It is intended to provide
evidence for long-standing allegations that Assange conspired with
Trump, and Trump’s supposed backers in the Kremlin, to damage
Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race.
The
Guardian’s latest story provides a supposedly stronger foundation
for an existing narrative: that Assange and Wikileaks knowingly
published emails hacked by Russia from the Democratic party’s
servers. In truth, there is no
public evidence that
the emails were hacked, or that Russia was involved. Central actors
have suggested instead that the emails were leaked from within the
Democratic party.
Nonetheless,
this unverified allegation has been aggressively exploited by the
Democratic leadership because it shifts attention away both from its
failure to mount an effective electoral challenge to Trump and from
the damaging contents of the emails. These show that party
bureaucrats sought to rig
the primaries to
make sure Clinton’s challenger for the Democratic nomination,
Bernie Sanders, lost.
To
underscore the intended effect of the Guardian’s new claims,
Harding even throws in a casual and unsubstantiated reference to
“Russians” joining Manafort in supposedly meeting Assange.
Manafort
has denied the
Guardian’s claims, while Assange has threatened to sue the
Guardian for libel.
‘Responsible
for Trump’
The
emotional impact of the Guardian story is to suggest that Assange is
responsible for four years or more of Trump rule. But more
significantly, it bolsters the otherwise risible
claim that
Assange is not a publisher – and thereby entitled to the
protections of a free press, as enjoyed by the Guardian or the New
York Times – but the head of an organisation engaged in espionage
for a foreign power.
The
intention is to deeply discredit Assange, and by extension the
Wikileaks organisation, in the eyes of right-thinking liberals. That,
in turn, will make it much easier to silence Assange and the vital
cause he represents: the use of new media to hold to account the old,
corporate media and political elites through the imposition of far
greater transparency.
The
Guardian story will prepare public opinion for the moment when
Ecuador’s rightwing government under President Lenin Moreno forces
Assange out of the embassy, having already withdrawn most of his
rights to use digital media.
It
will soften opposition when the UK moves to arrest Assange
on self-serving
bail violation charges and
extradites him to the US. And it will pave the way for the US legal
system to lock Assange up for a very long time.
For
the best part of a decade, any claims by Assange’s supporters that
avoiding this fate was the reason Assange originally sought asylum in
the embassy was ridiculed by corporate journalists, not least at the
Guardian.
Even
when a United Nations panel of experts in international law ruled in
2016 that Assange was being arbitrarily – and unlawfully –
detained by the UK, Guardian writers led efforts to discredit the UN
report. See here and here.
Now
Assange and his supporters have been proved right once again. An
administrative error this month revealed that the US justice
department had secretly
filed criminal charges against
Assange.
Heavy
surveillance
The
problem for the Guardian, which should have been obvious to its
editors from the outset, is that any visits by Manafort would be
easily verifiable without relying on unnamed “sources”.
Glenn
Greenwald is far from alone in noting that
London is possibly the most surveilled city in the world, with CCTV
cameras everywhere. The environs of the Ecuadorian embassy are
monitored especially heavily, with continuous filming by the UK and
Ecuadorian authorities and most likely by the US and other actors
with an interest in Assange’s fate.
The
idea that Manafort or “Russians” could have wandered into the
embassy to meet Assange even once without their trail, entry and
meeting being intimately scrutinised and recorded is simply
preposterous.
According
to Greenwald: “If Paul Manafort … visited Assange at the Embassy,
there would be ample amounts of video and other photographic proof
demonstrating that this happened. The Guardian provides none of
that.”
Former
British ambassador Craig Murray also points
out the
extensive security checks insisted on by the embassy to which any
visitor to Assange must submit. Any visits by Manafort would have
been logged.
In
fact, the Guardian obtained the
embassy’s logs in May, and has never made any mention of either
Manafort or “Russians” being identified in them. It did not refer
to the logs in its latest story.
Murray:
The
problem with this latest fabrication is that [Ecuador’s President]
Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry.
Neither Manafort nor these ‘Russians’ are in the visitor logs …
What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for
facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort?Furthermore
it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge
of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged
‘Russians’.
No
fact-checking
It
is worth noting it should be vitally important for a serious
publication like the Guardian to ensure its claims are unassailably
true – both because Assange’s personal fate rests on their
veracity, and because, even more importantly, a fundamental right,
the freedom of the press, is at stake.
Given
this, one would have expected the Guardian’s editors to have
insisted on the most stringent checks imaginable before going to
press with Harding’s story. At a very minimum, they should have
sought out a response from Assange and Manafort before publication.
Neither precaution was taken.
I
worked for the Guardian for a number of years, and know well the
layers of checks that any highly sensitive story has to go through
before publication. In that lengthy process, a variety of
commissioning editors, lawyers, backbench editors and the editor
herself, Kath Viner, would normally insist on cuts to anything that
could not be rigorously defended and corroborated.
And
yet this piece seems to have been casually waved through, given a
green light even though its profound shortcomings were evident to a
range of well-placed analysts and journalists from the outset.
That
at the very least hints that the Guardian thought they had
“insurance” on this story. And the only people who could have
promised that kind of insurance are the security and intelligence
services – presumably of Britain, the United States and / or
Ecuador.
It
appears the Guardian has simply taken this story, provided by spooks,
at face value. Even if it later turns out that Manafort did visit
Assange, the Guardian clearly had no compelling evidence for its
claims when it published them. That is profoundly irresponsible
journalism – fake news – that should be of the gravest concern to
readers.
A
pattern, not an aberration
Despite
all this, even analysts critical of the Guardian’s behaviour have
shown a glaring failure to understand that its latest coverage
represents not an aberration by the paper but decisively fits with a
pattern.
Glenn
Greenwald, who once had an influential column in the Guardian until
an apparent, though unacknowledged, falling out with his employer
over the Edward Snowden revelations, wrote a series of baffling
observations about the Guardian’s latest story.
First,
he suggested it
was simply evidence of the Guardian’s long-standing (and
well-documented) hostility towards Assange.
“The
Guardian, an otherwise solid and reliable paper, has such a pervasive
and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has
frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to
malign him.”
It
was also apparently evidence of the paper’s clickbait tendencies:
“They
[Guardian editors] knew that publishing this story would cause
partisan warriors to excitedly spread the story, and that cable news
outlets would hyperventilate over it, and that they’d reap the
rewards regardless of whether the story turned out to be true or
false.”
And
finally, in a bizarre tweet, Greenwald opined, “I hope the story
[maligning Assange] turns out true” – apparently because
maintenance of the Guardian’s reputation is more important than
Assange’s fate and the right of journalists to dig up embarrassing
secrets without fear of being imprisoned.
The reason it will be so devastating to the Guardian if this story turns out false is because the Guardian has an institutional hatred for Assange. They’ve proven they’ll dispense with journalistic standards for it. And factions within Ecuador’s government know they can use them.
What
this misses is that the Guardian’s attacks on Assange are not
exceptional or motivated solely by personal animosity. They are
entirely predictable and systematic. Rather than being the reason for
the Guardian violating basic journalistic standards and ethics, the
paper’s hatred of Assange is a symptom of a deeper malaise in the
Guardian and the wider corporate media.
Even
aside from its decade-long campaign against Assange, the Guardian is
far from “solid and reliable”, as Greenwald claims. It has been
at the forefront of the relentless, and unhinged, attacks on Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn for prioritising the rights of Palestinians over
Israel’s right to continue its belligerent occupation. Over the
past three years, the Guardian has injected credibility into the
Israel lobby’s desperate efforts to tar Corbyn as an anti-semite.
See here, here and here.
Similarly,
the Guardian worked tirelessly to promote Clinton and undermine
Sanders in the 2016 Democratic nomination process – another reason
the paper has been so assiduous in promoting the idea that Assange,
aided by Russia, was determined to promote Trump over Clinton for the
presidency.
The
Guardian’s coverage of Latin America, especially of populist
leftwing governments that have rebelled against traditional and
oppressive US hegemony in the region, has long grated with analysts
and experts. Its especial venom has been reserved for leftwing
figures like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, democratically elected but
official enemies of the US, rather than the region’s rightwing
authoritarians beloved of Washington.
The
Guardian has been vocal in the so-called “fake news” hysteria,
decrying the influence of social media, the only place where leftwing
dissidents have managed to find a small foothold to promote their
politics and counter the corporate media narrative.
The
Guardian has painted social media chiefly as a platform overrun by
Russian trolls, arguing that this should justify ever-tighter
restrictions that have so far curbed critical voices of the dissident
left more than the right.
Heroes
of the neoliberal order
Equally,
the Guardian has made clear who its true heroes are. Certainly not
Corbyn or Assange, who threaten to disrupt the entrenched neoliberal
order that is hurtling us towards climate breakdown and economic
collapse.
Its
pages, however, are readily available to the latest effort to prop up
the status quo from Tony Blair, the man who led Britain, on false
pretences, into the largest crime against humanity in living memory –
the attack on Iraq.
That
“humanitarian intervention” cost the lives of many hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis and created a vacuum that destabilised much of
the Middle East, sucked in Islamic jihadists like al-Qaeda and ISIS,
and contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe that has fuelled the
resurgence of the far-right. None of that is discussed in the
Guardian or considered grounds for disqualifying Blair as an arbiter
of what is good for Britain and the world’s future.
The
Guardian also has an especial soft spot for blogger Elliot Higgins,
who, aided by the Guardian, has shot to unlikely prominence as a
self-styled “weapons expert”. Like Luke Harding, Higgins
invariably seems ready to echo whatever the British and American
security services need verifying “independently”.
Higgins
and his well-staffed website Bellingcat have taken on for themselves
the role of arbiters of truth on many foreign affairs issues, taking
a prominent role in advocating for narratives that promote US and
NATO hegemony while demonising Russia, especially in highly contested
arenas such as Syria.
That
clear partisanship should be no surprise, given that Higgins now
enjoys an “academic” position at, and funding from, the Atlantic
Council, a high-level, Washington-based think-tank founded to drum up
support for NATO and justify its imperialist agenda.
Improbably,
the Guardian has adopted Higgins as the poster-boy for a supposed
citizen journalism it has sought to undermine as “fake news”
whenever it occurs on social media without the endorsement of
state-backed organisations.
The
truth is that the Guardian has not erred in this latest story
attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify
him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when
supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake – it
simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
Its
job is to shore up a consensus on the left for attacks on leading
threats to the existing, neoliberal order: whether they are a
platform like Wikileaks promoting whistle-blowing against a corrupt
western elite; or a politician like Jeremy Corbyn seeking to break
apart the status quo on the rapacious financial industries or
Israel-Palestine; or a radical leader like Hugo Chavez who threatened
to overturn a damaging and exploitative US dominance of “America’s
backyard”; or social media dissidents who have started to chip away
at the elite-friendly narratives of corporate media, including the
Guardian.
The
Guardian did not make a mistake in vilifying Assange without a shred
of evidence. It did what it is designed to do.
Zie ook het volgende artikel plus begeleidende video, waarin ook al onterecht beschuldigingen over contacten met Assange en de aanklachten tegen het Trump team, WikiLeaks en Rusland aangaande ‘Russiagate’, een beschuldiging die speciaal aanklager Mueller nooit rond gaat krijgen.
Het gaat hier om Randy
Credico (politiek- en mensenrechtenactivist, programmamaker en komiek), hij wordt door Mueller beschuldigd van banden met WikiLeaks….. (zien beste bezoeker!)
In
this exclusive interview, Abby Martin speaks with Randy Credico
on his role in the Russia investigation, his upcoming interview with
Robert Mueller, and his relationship with Trump campaign advisor
Roger Stone.
With
never before revealed details about Stone and the Mueller
investigation, Credico details his long-standing ties to the
political operative and answers the hard questions about his alleged
coordination with Wikileaks.
The
interview highlights the larger context of the multi-front assault on
Julian Assange, Wikileaks and the future of press freedom.
**
Vergeet niet dat de Obama administratie al lang bezig was om de
Russen te demoniseren, dit onder andere t.b.v. het militair-industrieel complex en waarmee de VS en haar oorlogshond de NAVO ook in Oekraïne aan de grens met Rusland zou komen te staan……..
Zo hebben Hillary Clinton en de CIA de opstand in Oekraïne op poten
gezet, een opstand waarvan de opzet was een staatsgreep te ontketenen
tegen de democratisch gekozen regering Janoekovytsj…… Deze ‘grap’
(een specialiteit van de VS) heeft de VS maar ‘liefst’ 4 miljard
dollar gekost…….
*** Deze toegevoegde tekst later overgenomen van Common Dreams, daar deze niet op Anti-Media werd genoemd en de extra vermelding terecht is (m.i.).
PS: geeft door mensen, er kan niet genoeg feiten worden weergegeven tegenover de enorme berg leugens (met heel veel ‘fake news, of anders gezegd: ‘nepnieuws’) waaruit het kwaadaardige sprookje Russiagate bestaat.
Zie wat betreft het Steele dossier, een spil in de leugens die men ‘Russiagate’ is gaan noemen, de volgende berichten:
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende twee artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
The
Guardian durft te beweren dat Paul Manafort meermaals contact had met
Julian Assange in de Ecuadoraanse ambassade in Londen, dit voorafgaand aan
de verkiezingen in 2016, bovendien zou Manafort Assange eerder hebben
bezocht in 2013 en 2015……..
Blijkbaar
werkt de speciaal aanklager Robert Mueller samen met
The Guardian in het promoten van het sprookje dat men ‘Russia Gate’ noemt, daar hij ‘geheel toevallig’ afgelopen maandag het
bericht naar buiten bracht dat Manafort de voorwaarden voor een plea
bargain had gebroken en meermaals heeft gelogen tegen de FBI
(Manafort zit een gevangenisstraf uit)……. Sterker nog: Manafort
zou volgens Mueller naast te hebben gelogen ook misdaden hebben
begaan in een groot aantal zaken…….
The
Guardian weet te melden dat de Ecuadoraanse inlichtingendienst bewijzen zou hebben van het bezoek dat Manafort bracht
aan de Ecuadoraanse ambassade, dit nog naast dezelfde claim van een
persoon die niet bekend is bij de FBI, ofwel een anonieme ‘bron….’
Volgens
The Guardian heeft Manafort in de lente van 2016 een bezoek van 40
minuten gebracht aan Assange, waar men zelfs weet te vertellen welke
kleding hij droeg (om twijfelaars te overtuigen…)…. Vreemd genoeg
moeten bezoekers aan de Ecuadoraanse ambassade zich registreren,
echter volgens medewerkers van de ambassade staat de naam Manafort niet één
keer genoteerd in het betreffende register……..
Voorts
weet The Guardian te melden dat de de Russiche militaire geheime dienst GROe de Democraten zou hebben
gehackt, een claim waarvan we weten dat die totaal zonder enig bewijs
keer op keer wordt herhaald…… Men wil zelfs niet uitgaan van de
mogelijkheid dat de documenten lokaal, dus in de VS zijn gekopieerd
en aan WikiLeaks zijn verzonden…..
Seth Rich, een medewerker van
het DNC, het democratische campagneteam dat Hillary Clinton bijstond
tijdens de voorverkiezingen, heeft uit frustratie over de smerige
campagne van Clinton tegen de andere democratische kandidaat Bernie
Sanders, een enorm aantal documenten gelekt naar WikiLeaks……
Enige tijd later zou Rich zijn vermoord tijdens een beroving, aldus
de politie, waarbij vreemd genoeg niets van hem werd gestolen……..
Lees
het volgende artikel van Tyler Durden, gepubliceerd op Zero Hedge
(door mij overgenomen van Anti-Media), in de niet eindigende soap die
men ‘Russiagate’ noemt, terwijl intussen duidelijk is geworden dat
m.n. Groot-Brittannië de Democratische Partij heeft geholpen bij het
manipuleren van de presidentsverkiezingen in de VS, ofwel: we moeten spreken
van Britaingate!!! Mensen geeft het door: nog dagelijks hoor je
leugenaars in en op de reguliere media beweren dat Rusland de VS
verkiezingen heeft gemanipuleerd…… Hoe eerder een eind komt aan
deze leugens hoe beter, immers de VS zoekt oorlog met Rusland
(geholpen door de rest van het westers terreurgeteisem en waaronder
ik ook Rutte 2 en 3 versta) en juist dit soort leugens maakt de argeloze
lezer klaar voor een oorlog tegen Rusland, ofwel WOIII……
Nogmaals
laat The Guardian zien dat het een trouwe lobbyist is van het
neoliberalisme, het militair-industrieel complex en de ongebreidelde terreur van de VS…… Verder heeft The Guardian geen moeite om voor deze zaken fake news (nepnieuws) te
verspreiden, zelfs niet als daar meer dan 2 miljoen mensen door omkomen, zoals de valse berichtgeving van The Guardian over de illegale oorlogen van de VS tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië en Syrië…… Die 1 miljoen dollar kan The Guardian dan ook
vergeten!!
WikiLeaks
Bets the Guardian $1,000,000 That Assange Never Met Paul Manafort
(ZHE) — Update: WikiLeaks
has fired back at the Guardian,
tweeting: “Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial
fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is
willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head
that Manafort never met Assange.”
Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange. https://archive.fo/pUjrj
The
Guardian‘s
report was written by Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, and was based
exclusively on unnamed sources.
Paul
Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, held secret
talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London,
right around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, according to The
Guardian, which
as is now the norm in reports of this kind refers to unnamed
“sources.”
***
Sources
have said Manafort
went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 –
during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for
the White House.
It
is unclear why Manafort wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.
But the last meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could
interest Robert
Mueller,
the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between
the Trump campaign and Russia.
A
well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see
Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released
a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
– The
Guardian
The
69-year-old Manafort has denied any involvement in the release of the
emails, and has said that the claim is “100%
false.”
While
Manafort was jailed this year under a plea agreement with special
counsel Robert Mueller, on Monday, Mueller said that Manafort
had repeatedly
lied to the FBI,
breaching his deal. According to documents filed in court, Manafort
committed “crimes and lies” covering a “variety of subject
matters.”
According
to The
Guardian,
Manafort’s first visit to the Ecuadorian embassy occurred one year
after Assange was granted asylum inside, according to two sources.
To add icing to the cake, “a separate internal document written by
Ecuador’s Senian Intelligence agency and
seen by The
Guardian lists
“Paul Manaford [sic]” as one of Assange’s several well-known
guests, along
with… “Russians.”
According
to two sources, Manafort returned to the embassy in 2015. He paid
another visit in spring 2016, turning up alone, around the time Trump
named him as his convention manager. The visit is tentatively dated
to March.
Manafort’s
2016 visit to Assange lasted about 40 minutes, one source said,
adding that the
American was casually dressed when he exited the embassy, wearing
sandy-coloured chinos, a cardigan and a light-coloured shirt.
Visitors
normally register with embassy security guards and show their
passports. Sources in Ecuador, however, say Manafort was not
logged. – The
Guardian
So
we have Manafort allegedly visiting Assange, in
sandy-coloured chinos, and
that Russians also visited the WikiLeaks founder. And none of this
was known until today.
The
Guardian goes
on to suggest that “The revelation could shed new light on the
sequence of events in the run-up to summer 2016, when WikiLeaks
published tens of thousands of emails hacked by the GRU*,
Russia’s military intelligence agency. Hillary
Clinton has said the hack contributed to her defeat.”
Note
that The
Guardian has
considered the “hack” settled, which agrees with Western
intelligence assessments (the same Western intelligence that
conducted espionage on Donald Trump’s campaign). Nowhere to be
found is the possibility that the emails were copied
locally –
a theory recently bolstered by a fresh
analysis that
flies in the face of a report commissioned by cybersecurity
firm Crowdstrike
– which
was caught fabricating a report on Russia hacking Ukrainian
munitions, and was forced to retract portions of their analysis after
the government of Ukraine admonished them.
The
Guardian goes
on to link Manafort to “black operations” against the political
rival of Ukraine’s former “Moscow-friendly president, Viktor
Yanukovych,” and that Manafort “flew frequently from the US to
Ukraine’s capital, Kiev – usually
via Frankfurt but sometimes through London.”
Manafort
is currently in jail in Alexandria, Virginia. In August a jury
convicted him of crimes arising from his decade-long activities in
Ukraine. They include large-scale money laundering and failure to pay
US tax. Manafort pleaded guilty to further charges in order to avoid
a second trial in Washington.
As
well as accusing him of lying on Monday, the special counsel moved to
set a date for Manafort to be sentenced.
One
person familiar with WikiLeaks said Assange was motivated to damage
the Democrats campaign because he believed a future Trump
administration would be less likely to seek his extradition on
possible charges of espionage. This fate had hung over Assange since
2010, when he released
confidential US state department cables.
It contributed to his decision to take refuge in the embassy. – The
Guardian
And
in perhaps the most shocking part of The
Guardian‘s
reporting, they
refer to the highly salacious and largely discredited “Steele
Dossier,”**saying
that according to the document, Manafort was at the center of a
“well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between the Trump
campaign and the Kremlin, and that both sides had a mutual interest
in defeating Clinton, wrote former MI6 spy Christopher Steele.
In
a memo written soon after the DNC emails were published, Steele said:
“The [hacking] operation had been conducted with the full knowledge
and support of Trump and senior members of his campaign team.” – The
Guardian
You
know things are desperate when the Steele Dossier makes a guest
appearance to once again bolster unsupported reporting.
‘Campagne Clinton, smeriger dan gedacht…………‘ (met daarin daarin opgenomen de volgende twee artikelen: ‘Donna Brazile Bombshell: ‘Proof’ Hillary ‘Rigged’ Primary Against Bernie‘ en ‘Democrats in Denial After Donna Brazile Says Primary Was Rigged for Hillary‘)
Oké
mensen, niets nieuws, maar gezien het continu volhouden van leugens
in de reguliere westerse media (en door het grootste deel van de
politici), kan de waarheid niet vaak genoeg herhaald worden (als was het tegengif), inclusief het noemen van de bewijzen dat het om
leugens gaat. Dat geldt bijvoorbeeld voor alle leugens over ‘fake
news’ (nepnieuws), maar ook die over de illegale oorlogen van de VS
tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, Syrië, Iran en Venezuela (de laatste
2 een economische oorlog die deze landen op de knieën moeten krijgen voor
de VS…..)…….
Overigens zijn de reguliere westerse (massa-) media in handen van super welgestelden (plutocraten) en investeringsmaatschappijen, die daarmee die media al sturen, ofwel winst über alles! Die winst gaat op zeker ver voor de waarheid, waarbij het inhumane neoliberalisme (‘fascisme light’) ten koste van alles moet worden beschermd en gepropageerd……. Over manipulaties gesproken……
Kit
Klarenberg is de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel,
eerder geplaatst op Sputnik, daarin beschrijft zij het boek van T.J. Coles met de
volgende titel: ‘Real Fake News: Techniques of Propaganda
and Deception-based Mind Control’.
Coles
gaat ook in op de geschiedenis van fake news, maar dan wel het ‘fake
news’ dat machthebbers gebruiken om hun positie veilig te
stellen…… Het eerst bekende gebruik van fake news was dat door de
Babylonische heersers, die daarmee hun goddelijke aanwijzing
probeerden te bewijzen (en dat lukte destijds wonderwel goed, later
nam het christelijk geloof het over om de koning en koningin als door god gegeven functies neer te zetten, deze achterlijke gedachtekronkel werd ook in de bijbel opgenomen). Terwijl de adel aanvankelijk bestond uit de sterkste en
wreedste boeren die de boel met veel geweld onder hun duim wisten te houden en het volk uitbuitten tot het erbij neerviel……..
Trouwens
over religies of geloven gesproken: als er één groot fake gebeuren
is zijn het de religies wel, al gaat het dan in het westen wel over ‘lang’ vervlogen tijden, tegenwoordig gebruikt men zoals gezegd de media (en de
politiek) als vehikel om ‘fake news’ (nepnieuws) te brengen……. De voorbeelden
van het verkondigen van fake news zijn overweldigend zie wat dat
betreft niet alleen het bericht hierna, maar ook de links die na dat
artikel zijn opgenomen.
HOW
ELITES USE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TO ‘MAINTAIN AND EXPAND THEIR POWER’
(Sputnik)
– For
quite some time, debate about ‘fake news’ has reverberated
clamorously in both mainstream and alternative discourse. One could
easily conclude the issue was a pressingly new plague, restricted to
certain corners of the web – but academic TJ Coles begs to differ.
In fact, he tells Sputnik fake news has been ubiquitous for thousands
of years.
It’s
difficult to pinpoint the precise moment the term ‘fake news’
entered the Western political and media lexicon, but the
election of Donald Trump as US President certainly
turbocharged its usage. For the controversial leader and his
supporters, the label can be automatically applied to any and
all media reporting critical of him, while his opponents play
much the same game when roles are reversed.
“All
that talk made me think ‘hang on a minute, we’ve always had
fake news’. It’s the nature of power — all power
structures want to maintain and expand their power, so it’s
therefore important to present information that benefits them,
and keeps populations in a psychological and/or intellectual
prison. The ‘fake news’ peddled by elite financial,
commercial and political financial interests, duly regurgitated
by major media organizations, eclipses any bogus story
perpetuated by alleged ‘bots’ on Twitter, or whatever,”
TJ says.
BABYLONIAN
BEGINNINGS
In
his work, TJ traces the birth of fake news all the way back
to ancient Babylon, when rulers sought to perpetuate the
notion they were descended from Gods and thus had a right
to dominate and control the populace — history’s first
recorded instance of the ‘divine right of kings’.
Similarly,
Plato famously popularized the idea of the ‘noble lie’ —
privileging untruths told for the benefit of elites and the
population alike. These ideas very much endure in the modern
day — TJ notes Wikileaks’ dump of the Clinton
campaign’s internal emails amply demonstrates her team felt it
wouldn’t be good, or necessary, for Hillary’s supporters
to be aware of her close connections to Wall Street,
so did their utmost to conceal the mephitic kinship.
“Elites
the world over are acutely aware information is power, and
actually quite open about their use and abuse of the news
to shape public perceptions and preserve sociopolitical
conditions benefitting them. For instance, the UK Ministry of Defence
regularly publishes projections of how planners think the world
will look in 10 — 20 years, and they routinely note the
media is one of the key ways to maintain the current
paradigm, and discuss the various ways information can be
‘weaponized’ against the public,” he says.
TJ
suggests elites shape and control the public mind so effectively
because they exploit fundamental facets of human nature. First,
the well-established instinctive inclination to reflexively
believe something reinforcing one’s existing beliefs, rather
than assessing whether alternative facts or viewpoints have any
value, or indeed considering whether what one believes might be
wrong, or informed by confirmation bias.
This
tendency is greatly exacerbated by the use of internet and
social media algorithms that present a ‘personalized’ picture
of the world to users, unfailingly presenting individuals
with content they want to see, and tacitly suppressing
information contrary to their existing opinions.
“Elites
also know how easy it is to exploit guilt, which is why atrocity
propaganda is so widespread today. Most sympathize with the
victims of major atrocities, and naturally want to do
something to help, so this aspect of human nature can be
easily manipulated to justify aggressive foreign policy
actions — ‘look at what we’re letting happen to poor
defenceless people, we have a responsibility to protect them’
etcetera. It’s funny, when it comes to the economy, the
powerful are quick to say people are naturally selfish, so it’s
everyone for themselves, but when it comes to foreign
policy, we should care about our fellow human beings and do
something to help,” TJ says.
ABSENCE
IS EVIDENCE
As
the academic’s work makes clear, atrocity propaganda doesn’t even
need to have any grounding in reality whatsoever. In the
lead-up to the NATO-backed violent overthrow of Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the mainstream media was awash
with reports government forces fuelled by viagra were
conducting mass rapes of civilians, and planning a borderline
genocidal massacre of rebel forces — claims used
to justify the imposition of a no-fly zone over the
country, and NATO airstrikes.
The
stories were subsequently found to be entirely
without foundation —
similarly, serious question marks hover over the veracity
of numerous
claimed chemical
weapons attacks in Syria, which likewise have provided a pretext
for Western attacks on the country.
“It’s
especially easy to exploit guilt when you present bite-sized
news reports about an atrocious event stripped of all
context, and exclude the voices of people who are actually
on the ground. Occasionally, contradictory voices do filter
through the system, although largely by accident. For
instance, the BBC made the mistake of inviting Peter Ford,
former UK ambassador to Syria, on air to discuss
chemical weapons attacks — he quickly demolished their
propaganda. He hasn’t been invited back since,” TJ says.
Ford
is surely but one of a great many talking heads
to effectively be banned from appearing on the BBC
for daring to state views and evidence contrary
to ascendant elite narratives. However, the British state
broadcaster’s blacklisting activities also extend to its own
employees — in April
2018,
the BBC admitted that for decades, job applicants and serving
staff were subject to political vetting by MI5, in an
effort to prevent “subversives” gaining employment with the
Corporation.
Often,
individuals were ostracized on extremely tenuous grounds. For
instance, respected film director John Goldschmidt was blacklisted
in the late 1960s, with two projects he was working on for
the Beeb cancelled midway through production without warning
or explanation — MI5 deemed him a potential subversive as he’d
spent a few weeks in Czechoslovakia in his youth, as part
of a student exchange program. Similarly, award-winning
journalist Isabel Hilton was refused a job by BBC Scotland
in 1976 — that she spoke Chinese and had been a member
of Scottish China Association at Edinburgh University made
MI5 extremely anxious.
Under
the policy, popular children’s book author and playwright Michael
Rosen was also outright sacked from the BBC in 1972 while a
graduate trainee for a number of ‘transgressions’, including
student activism at Oxford, and producing a film featuring clips
of US soldiers being tested with LSD. The American Embassy
in London complained about the project to both MI5 and
the BBC directly, whereupon Rosen was shown the door.
The
policy was wound down in the 1990s, and it’s unknown whether
any comparable structures existed at other major news
organizations — although City
University research suggests
dissenting voices remain rare in the British mainstream media.
The 2016 study concluded UK journalists are overwhelmingly white,
male, and elite-university educated — and are far more
trusting of politicians, the government, police and military
than the general population, which the study’s authors partly
attributed to reporters’ “reliance on these
institutions as sources of information”.
Such
widespread faith in the establishment may account for why
so many prominent reporters see no problem with maintaining
close relationships with the intelligence services. The
Guardian’s Luke Harding has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised his warm bond with British spying agencies
in articles and books — and equally frequently been
condemned for uncritically running stories of questionable
probity potentially provided to him by agency staff. In
a September article he
claimed Russian diplomats had held secret talks in London
with associates of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in an
attempt to assist in his escape from the UK. The
covert action would’ve allegedly seen Assange smuggled out of
the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover
of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported
to Moscow.
The
story was entirely based on the testimony of anonymous
sources, the identity of which Harding didn’t even hint at in
the piece. In response, Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador
to Uzbekistan, slammed the article, calling it a “quite
extraordinary set of deliberate lies” and “entirely black
propaganda” published by an “MI6 tool”.
“I
was closely involved with Julian and with Fidel Narvaez
of the Ecuadorean Embassy at the end of last year
in discussing possible future destinations for Julian. It
is not only the case Russia did not figure in those plans, it is
a fact Julian directly ruled out the possibility as undesirable.
The entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. It is very
serious indeed when a newspaper like the Guardian prints a
tissue of deliberate lies in order to spread fake news
on behalf of the security services. I cannot find words
eloquent enough to express the depth of my contempt
for Harding and Katherine Viner, who have betrayed completely
the values of journalism,” Murray wrote.
Similarly,
in 2007 the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention
in Iran published
an analysis of
44 articles written by Daily Telegraph Defence Editor Con
Couglin on Iran — including stories suggesting North
Korea was helping Tehran prepare a nuclear weapons test, and the
country was grooming Bin Laden’s successor. They found the pieces
almost invariably were based on “unnamed or untraceable” sources
in intelligence agencies or the UK Foreign Office and “published
at sensitive and delicate times” when there’d been
“relatively positive diplomatic moves” towards Iran, and
contained ‘exclusive revelations’ about Iran combined
with eye-catchingly controversial headlines, which were
typically based on a single sentence in the wider article.
PRISON
BREAK
Despite
his bleak analysis, TJ does not view the elite monopoly
on information as insurmountable, or invincible —
there’s much individuals and groups can do to shatter the
stranglehold.
“People
should keep a keen eye on sources that analyse news reporting
and misreporting, such as Glasgow
University Media Group and MediaLens,
which offer alternative information and tell you what media coverage
is actively omitting from the real story. However, change must
come from within too — people should divorce themselves
from preconceptions, and question their beliefs wherever and
whenever possible. When presented with information that doesn’t
conform to our predispositions, we should ask ourselves whether
it’s true, rather than reflexively dismissing it outright,”
TJ says.
While
having less trust in the media more generally is a must, the
academic also warns against placing too much faith
in alternative news outlets and social networks, despite them
being valuable resources with a significant positive potential.
“Independent
media is growing in size and strength, but its overall
reach is still relatively tiny — while print circulation is
obviously down, people still get the vast bulk of their
information from mainstream outlets. Similarly, social media
could’ve democratized the spread of information, but it
hasn’t — and in fact any such potential has probably
been neutered by the proliferation of ‘fact-checking’
resources, which are anything but unbiased and disinterested
arbiters of truth,” TJ notes.
One-such
‘fact-checker’ is the Atlantic Council, a NATO-offshoot
with a board
of directors comprised
of a ‘who’s who’ of contentious US political figures,
including Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert
Gates, Michael Hayden and David Petraeus, among others.
It
partnered with Facebook in May to “independently monitor
disinformation and other vulnerabilities” and combat the spread
of fake news on the platform. To
date,
the collaboration has resulted in untold hundreds of pages
and personal accounts being shut down — rather than being
promulgators of propaganda though, the overwhelming bulk of the
banished were alternative news sources, political organizations and
individuals, highlighting issues and events the mainstream media
downplays or ignores, such as US interventionism, drug
legalization and police brutality.
Moreover,
that elites exploit social media’s information-sharing capabilities
to suit their own objectives is well-established.
“The
US State Department has used major social networks to recruit
revolutionaries on several occasions, most notably during the
‘Arab Spring’, connecting ‘moderate rebels’ — actually
violent jihadist lunatics — in select countries.
Washington wanted Assad, Gaddafi and Mubarak gone, because they
weren’t following orders — but there were no
Twitter or Facebook ‘revolutions’ in the Gulf states,
because the American empire wanted their rulers to remain
in place. In Cuba, the CIA even went as far as creating
a social network for the same purpose,” TJ concludes.
The
views and opinions expressed by the contributors do not
necessarily reflect those of Sputnik
Gisteren op het blog van Stan van Houcke een artikel van the Canary, dat op 6 mei vorig jaar werd gepubliceerd. Het handelt hier over wie macht uitoefent via de BBC, de publieke Britse omroep, die intussen gerust een gezwel kan worden genoemd, als je alle aftakkingen in het buitenland ziet, zoals die in Canada.
Op dit blog heeft u al vaak kunnen lezen, over de propaganda die de BBC dag in dag uitstort over het Britse publiek, neem de Brexit of de enorme hoeveelheid leugens over de strijd in Aleppo (en het weglaten van feiten, zoals de terreur die de ‘gematigde rebellen’ uitoefende op de bevolking in Oost-Aleppo….)……..
Helaas voor diegenen die het Engels niet kunnen lezen is het een Engelstalig artikel (al kan je e.e.a. via het besturingssysteem van Microsoft laten ‘vertalen’), hier het volledige artikel:
The
sorry facts which show the BBC has moved beyond bias, into pure
propaganda
EDITORIAL
The
BBC and its political editor Laura Kuenssberg are under
fire this
week, following local election coverage which has been dismissed as
nothing short of propaganda by people across the country. But how did
we get here?
Who
runs the BBC?
Rona
Fairhead, Chair of the BBC Trust, and board member of HSBC (image
via BBC)
The
current abysmal state of BBC News and Politics makes much more sense
when you see who has been appointed to plot its editorial
course.
The BBC
Trust is
responsible for granting licenses to all BBC outlets and stations,
managing value for money on licence fee payments and ‘the
direction of BBC editorial and creative output’.
The Trust consists of 12 Trustees and is headed by Rona
Fairhead – who
also happens to have been a longtime board member of HSBC bank.
As The
Canary’s James
Wright reported earlier
this year:
Fairhead
has entrenched ties to the Tory government. In fact, she and Osborne are
old friends.
Fairhead worked
for the
Conservative government as a cabinet office member, until being
appointed by the previous Conservative culture secretary – Sajid
Javid – as the new head of the BBC Trust. She is
still business
ambassador for David Cameron.
Fairhead
has also sat on the board of HSBC directors for a long time. And what
is even more shocking than her other Conservative links are claims
that she was actually appointed chairwoman of the BBC Trust to keep a
lid on Cameron’s involvement in covering up a
£1bn fraudulent HSBC scam on British shoppers.
Whistle-blower Nicholas
Wilson made
various freedom of information requests that confirmed that
Fairhead’s appointment did not follow proper procedure. She was
rushed to the position after the application date closed, with no
mention of her on any contemporary media shortlist.
Her
appointment does not coincide with the normal process, and many
questioned why
a business tycoon was right for the job. What
it did coincide with was
a string of interconnected visits from the BBC, HSBC, the Houses of
Parliament and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to Wilson’s
website where he details the scam and the FCA and Cameron’s
involvement in covering it up.
But
the conflicts of interest do not stop at Fairhead.
This
is the calibre of the figures responsible for hiring the news teams,
presenters and journalists who will report on matters of hacking,
privacy, and the Middle East.
These
are not trivial conflicts of interests. The two individuals primarily
responsible for driving the News and Politics agenda for the BBC, are
instead driving forward their personal and professional causes –
and the licence fee payer is footing the bill.
What
is the impact on reporting?
These
conflicts of interest affect the reporting of News and Politics at
the BBC in a very real way. In 2013, researchers at Cardiff
University undertook a major
content analysis of
BBC coverage – funded in part by the BBC Trust. They studied the
impartiality of BBC reporting across several areas,
including the Israel-Palestine conflict, the EU, business and
economics, and politics.
Whichever
party is in power, the Conservative party is granted more air time.
On
BBC News at Six, business representatives outnumbered trade union
spokespersons by more than five to one (11 vs 2) in 2007 and by 19
to one in 2012.
When
it comes to the Financial Crisis, BBC coverage was almost
completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund
managers and other City voices. Civil
society voices or commentators who
questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were
almost completely absent from coverage.
On
top of this, BBC reporting of Israel-Palestine has been woefully
partisan – and in 2013, we found out one reason why.
In
2013, a devastating report by Electronic
Intifada,
revealed that Raffi
Berg,
online editor for BBC News, was instructing journalists to skew
reports on Israel-Palestine in favour of Israel. While hundreds of
Palestinians were losing their lives during Israel’s eight day
assault on the Gaza strip in 2012, Berg was emailing
journalists with ‘guidance’ to maintain a pro-Israel tone in
their reports.
This from the report:
In
one, he asked BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way which
does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel for starting the
prolonged attacks. Instead, he encouraged journalists to promote the
Israeli government line that the “offensive” was “aimed at
ending rocket fire from Gaza.”
This
was despite the fact that Israel broke a ceasefire when it attacked
Gaza on 14 November, a ceasefire which the Palestinians had been
observing — firing no rockets into Israel.
In
a second email, sent during the same period, Berg told BBC
journalists:
“Please
remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt
controls the southern border.”
He
omitted to mention that the United Nations views Israel as the
occupying power in Gaza and has called on Israel to end its siege of
the Strip. Israel’s refusal to do so is a violation of UN Security
Council Resolution 1860.”
Berg
is still in his role.
All
that’s left is propaganda
Recently,
these two vested interests – pro-neoliberalism and pro-Israel –
converged on an area of common interest: opposition to Jeremy Corbyn.
This
united bitter Blairites, Conservatives and pro-Israel groups – who
ran perhaps the most
toxic smear campaign against
the Labour party and its leader in living memory. In the run up to
the local elections on May 5, the headlines across the BBC and wider
media’s flagship television and radio programs was not the 1
million people in
the UK reliant on food banks to eat, but the intrigue of the smear
campaign.
Prior
to the elections, the reporting by Kuenssberg was dominated almost
exclusively by claims of crisis within Labour, providing a platform
to a minority of bitter Blairites, and applying pressure on Corbyn to
stand aside – or at the very least prepare to.
On
Friday morning – when Corbyn’s vote had not collapsed, but
increased, compared to Miliband’s general election performance of
2015 – there was no apology for the wrongful prediction.
Instead, the narrative wheeled on regardless. While the SNP lost
their majority in Scotland, and Labour advanced in England and Wales
– this was the BBC website’s response.
The
situation brings to mind the moment when the BBC’s Andrew Marr
interviewed Noam Chomsky about the role of the mainstream media as a
propaganda service. Chomsky was discussing the role of
self-censorship by journalists, and Marr repudiated the claim,
asking:
“How
can you know if I am self-censoring?” Arguing he had never been
censored, or told what to think.
Chomsky
calmly responds, as if he were explaining the non-existence of Santa
Claus to a child:
“I’m
sure you believe everything you’re saying, but what I’m saying is
that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting
where you’re sitting.”
And
therein lies the rub with the role of the BBC, and the wider
mainstream media, as a vehicle by which to advance the causes of
those who own and run them. There is a monopoly of wealth and power
in our society which translates directly into a monopoly of the
media. The result is a staggering lack of diversity and pluralism of
voices and opinions in the mainstream space. The media has
become little more than a monotonous, relentless monologue – when
as a country, and a world, we need to be having a conversation.
Read
more in our recommended book:
Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media Paperback– 20
Apr 1995
Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het bovenstaande, klik op één van de labels, die u onder dit bericht aantreft, dit geldt niet voor de labels: Fairhead, Harding, HSBC, Javid, Kuenssberg, N. Wilson en R. Berg.
Nog toegevoegd: link naar originele bericht, dit vanwege onduidelijkheid getoonde statistieken (al is het daar niet veel duidelijker).
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