A few weeks ago, my parents woke up to find a large, orange swastika daubed in paint on a wooden plank outside their house in Sydney. 

We have a mezuzah attached to our front doorpost, so the "dauber" knew we were a Jewish household. At the time, my parents were angry and sad more than frightened.

My family's experience cannot compare with the hate that burst forth in Pittsburgh several weeks ago, when 11 congregants at the Tree of Life Synagogue were murdered simply because they were Jewish people attending prayer.

But we are living in a period of increasing hatred directed at minorities of all kinds, and anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe.

The Pittsburgh synagogue gunman, Robert Bowers, raged in online platforms that Jews were "invaders" trying to destabilise the United States. They were, he said, "an infestation" and "evil". Bowers' rants cast Jews in the role of dangerous revolutionaries out to destroy Western civilisation. This has long been a staple perspective of anti-Semitism.

I have been studying the anti-Semitic images that were commonplace in Vienna early last century. These stereotyped images served to vilify Jewish people, culminating in the removal of most of the Jews from Vienna in 1938.

I believe it is important that we reflect on these upsetting images to consider how the "mainstreaming" of anti-Semitic ideas and images in popular media can have terrible consequences.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/how-anti-semitic-stereotypes-from...

Synagogue in Berlin (picture by Gus Leonisky):

Sculpture dedicated to the Jewish people, Berlin (picture by Gus Leonisky)

Prime Minister,

History is repeating itself.

You have dishonourably exploited your apology for Canada’s historical rejection of Jewish refugees during World War II to falsely conflate antisemitism with and callously reject Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) efforts to protect the human rights of generations of Palestinian refugees ‘chased out of their homes’ and ‘Persecuted, robbed, jailed and killed because of who they were.’Furthermore the Jewish state ‘had denied them their citizenship and their fundamental rights.’

“Anti-Semitism is far too present. Jewish students still feel unwelcomed and uncomfortable on some of our colleges and university campuses because of BDS-related intimidation.

And out of our entire community of nations, it is Israel whose right to exist is most widely and wrongly questioned.”

Wrongly questioned??? For the informed and integrity-minded it is ‘impossible to ignore the challenges and injustices still facing’ Palestinian families today under the illegal Israeli occupation of their land.

Your ambassador to the United Nations says,

Since coming to office, Prime Minister Trudeau and the Government of Canada have been clear about the importance of the United Nations and multilateral engagement. Canada recognizes that a collective effort is needed of all Member States and all stakeholders if we are to find solutions to the many challenges before us.”

However your and the Harper governments, unmoved by the plight of these [Palestinian] refugees, and indifferent to their suffering, have turned their backs on multiple UN resolutions condemning the alarming rate of Israel’s apartheid policies, illegal settlement expansion and daily crimes against humanity and war crimes according to the Fourth Geneva Conventions.

Thus, Canada continues to turn its back on these innocent victims of the Jewish state’s brutal regime and by collaborating shares the immoral responsibility to doom Palestinian families to the horrors of the West Bank and Gaza ghettos.

In your apology you make reference to the tragic massacre ‘at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding six others’. You say, ‘Places of worship are sacred, and they should be sanctuaries for all faith communities.’Does ‘all’ include the despicable act of the 29 Palestinians ‘murdered in their sanctuary’ of the Ibrahim Mosque plus the 100 injured by Israeli doctor, Baruch Goldstein?

Surely, you would agree that one’s home and nation is also a sanctuary. But there are the massacres perpetrated today by Zionist snipers slaughtering unarmed non-violent refugees, abled and disabled Palestinian children and youth, who daily bravely demand, at the walls and fences of their humanitarian crisis, for their right of return to their homes under international law. Like the Jewish refugees on the MS St Louis, Canada deems the Palestinian refugees, innocent victims of the Zionist regime, unworthy of a home, and undeserving of your help.

As a member state of the UN, under obligation to uphold political and human rights of the people of Palestine, Canada has failed miserably and the bounds of its humanity is morally and gravely limited thanks to your servile prostration to Israel and the USA.

It was unacceptable that Canada turned its back on the Jews of Europe, and it is unacceptable now that Canada is failing to stop the discrimination, hate-motivated crimes, violence and threat of Zionism against the vulnerable Palestinian people.

More than 70 years ago, Canada turned its back on Palestine by voting for the UN Partition Plan for which the UN had no legal mandate to divide up foreign territory. Certainly, ‘time has by no means absolved Canada of its guilt or lessened the weight of its shame.’ In fact, you have augmented both guilt and shame with your indifference, lack of political courage and legitimisation of Zionist atrocities.

It is time that the ongoing dishonourable chapters of Canada’s abusive history of the Palestinian people end and that its lessons are never forgotten by Canada’s ‘children and grandchildren’.

Palestine does not need you to apologise. Rather, Canadians must unwaveringly ‘pledge, now and forever, never again’ to violate the respect for Palestine’s humanity enshrined in the UN Charter and pledge to take part in the ‘social struggles for fairness, justice and human rights,’ ‘for democracy and the rule of law, for equality and liberty’ that is the spirit and agency of BDS.

Nor should the international community pit a Palestinian state against a Jewish state. It is our ‘collective responsibility’ to support a one-nation solution in which Palestinians and Jews live together in equality and peace.

Sincerely

Dr Vacy Vlazna
Coordinator
Justice for Palestine Matters
www.palestinematters.com
Sydney, Guringai, Australia

source:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/11/14/open-letter-justin-trudeau-and-the-b...

Read from top.

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/shaun-micallefs-mad-as-hell/series/9

According to Australian Women's Weekly editor-at-large and Royal correspondent Juliet Rieden, "the feud is a massive storm in a teacup".

"It has been completely blown out of proportion by the media, who every day need to come up with a different story," she said.

Why, then, are we so obsessed?

"We're all sensible people — we read these stories and we realise it's based on one flick of an eye or some tiny little detail that could be interpreted in so many different ways, and we all realise we've been had.

"But, by that time the story has been read, the click has been registered and another story is being created."

Read more crap:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-30/meghan-markle-year-2018-rumours-starting/

Read from top.

Read also:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/26787

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35712

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34936

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35646

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/34950

Eric Zuesse

A large part of Noam Chomsky’s public image as an intellectual is derived not from his role in the field of linguistics, but instead from his having co-authored with Edward Herman Manufacturing Consent. The first matter to be discussed here will therefore be Chomsky’s contribution to that work; and, more broadly, that work’s contribution to human understanding — the actual significance of the book.

Chomsky’s contribution to that 1988 book was to describe the selling of specifically the wars in Vietnam and in adjoining Indochinese nations, according to that book’s main author, Herman’s, theory. That theory was called the “Propaganda model of communication”. It’s the book’s theory, or “model,” of manufacturing consent for wars. According to their book, the practitioners of this model are the public relations or PR profession that sell, to the domestic American public, invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. This is a specialized field of PR.

Herman’s theory (or “model”) of political PR (commonly called “propaganda”) for the invasion and control of foreign countries, had, itself, actually already been presented 66 years earlier in almost full form in Walter Lippmann’s 1922 introduction of that concept, “the manufacture of consent,” but Lippmann focused there more broadly, on the selling of all types of governmental polices, and not only on the selling of invasions and military occupations of foreign lands. Lippmann had introduced this broader concept of “the manufacture of consent,” in his 1922 book Public Opinion.

Chomsky’s theoretical contribution to the concept — that is, to the theory (manufacture of consent) — was nil, and even Herman’s additions to Lippmann’s theory (Herman’s model of it, that is, for selling wars) were only minor, and certainly not as deep as Lippmann’s broader theory is. Lippmann’s analysis of the subject was the foundation of Herman’s “Propaganda Model.” Herman’s “model” of Lippmann’s theory was merely the application of “the manufacture of consent” to specifically the selling of foreign invasions and military occupations.

In any case, as Edward Herman’s biographer said, “Ed was the primary author. Ed developed the Propaganda Model and wrote the chapters before the Indochina wars, and Noam wrote the Indochina chapters.”This would mean that Chomsky wrote pages 169-296 (127 pages) of the 330-page work. He applied there Herman’s model, to analysis of the media-coverage of the wars in three countries: Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Chomsky was the co-author who also gave the public speeches and most of the interviews on the book, because he was its famous author. Chomsky was therefore constantly generating new sales and income for both of the authors. He was the book’s main salesman. And this was Chomsky’s main contribution, outside of linguistics. Of course, his speeches and interviews about mainly-Herman’s book also helped considerably to increase Chomsky’s fame beyond his narrow technical field of linguistics.

Chomsky’s chief non-linguistic contribution to the world has thus been his marketing Herman’s model of the sales-promotions (the propaganda) for wars; and that model, in turn, was based upon Lippmann’s theory of the manufacture of consent. Here is how he marketed it:

In a 2002 interview, Chomsky said:

The term “manufacturing consent” is not mine, I took it from Walter Lippmann, the leading public intellectual and leading media figure of the twentieth century, who thought it was a great idea. He said we should manufacture consent, that’s the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds.

That’s not true. Lippmann instead had said the manufacture of consent happens, and throughout history has happened, in each and every nation, of every type. He didn’t say it “should” happen, but that it always does happen. He said a very different thing than what Chomsky said that Lippmann had said. What Lippmann had said is also far less heinous than Chomsky’s smear of Lippmann made it appear to be. It wasn’t heinous at all.

Here is the key part of Lippmann’s actual presentation on the matter:

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power.

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

Nowhere in all of Lippmann’s published writings did he ever say anything like: “We should manufacture consent, that’s the way democracies should work. There should be a small group of powerful people, and the rest of the population should be spectators, and you should force them to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds.”

Elsewhere, Chomsky asserted, which likewise was misrepresenting Lippmann’s views:

He [Lippmann] said this is useful and necessary because the common interests, the concerns of all people, elude the public. The public isn’t up to dealing with them, and they [“the concerns of all people”] have to be the domain of what he called a specialized class. 

Notice that that’s the opposite of the standard view about democracy. There’s a version of this expressed by the very respected moralist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. … His view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man …, “necessary illusions” [are needed]. …

It’s not the case as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy, rather as this whole line of thinker observes, it’s the essence of democracy.

Lippmann’s view was instead that it’s not “the essence of” any type of government, but that it is an unfortunate part of every type of government. Instead of being portrayed as “the essence of democracy,” it was portrayed as something that’s in every sort of government.

The closest that Lippmann had said, to Chomsky’s version of it, was:

In the absence of institutions and education by which the environment is so successfully reported that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion, the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality. This class is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property.

Lippmann there essentially defined what he had otherwise called “the sinister meaning of the word [propaganda]” as being the “irresponsible” type of it. Lippmann was not saying that this is what should be — much less that it’s the way any country ought to function. He was even, on the contrary, warning against it.

Lippmann went on to say “The democratic theory by failing to admit that self-centered opinions are not sufficient to procure good government, is involved in perpetual conflict between theory and practice.” His warning was prophetically important. He was pointing out the difference between the way things are (lacking some democratic regulations — democratic governance — that are needed in order to serve and protect individuals), and the way things must become, if the future isn’t to go the wrong way (as it has done, and still is doing). In any “non-sinister meaning” of the word “propaganda,” “the environment is so successfully reported [by practitioners of the propaganda professions] that the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion.” Only to the extent that PR is entirely truthful, informing the public in such a way that “the realities of public life stand out sharply against self-centered opinion” and not at all deceiving or misleading people, can it even possibly avoid being “sinister.” And whenever it is “sinister,” it is “irresponsible.” He was clear.

Lippmann was (especially as seen now, in historical retrospect) both true and wise. The misrepresentation of him by Chomsky presents Lippmann instead as having been sinister.

Misrepresentations such as those described above, are common in Chomsky’s public statements. In the above examples, the topic happened to be one (“Manufacturing Consent”) regarding which Chomsky had gained a significant portion of his fame as being a supposed expert and authority. He supposedly understood this subject, and was supposedly an expert speaker about it, who wouldn’t distort and lie about the matter, such as he routinely does. (The examples cited here are not anomalous, they are typical.)

In 2005, the trade-newspaper for college and university professors, the Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined “Chomsky as the world’s top public intellectual”. It reported that in the first-ever poll taken by Britain’s Prospect magazine, Chomsky “has been voted the world’s leading public intellectual from a list of 100 prominent thinkers compiled by the British magazine.” Prospect also “holds the annual Think Tank Awards, which celebrate and reward the work of think tanks on a national and global scale. The awards are supported by Shell” and by other international corporations. Each one of them has a PR department, lobbyists, and other members of what Chomsky said that Lippmann had said was the “specialized class” “that’s the way democracies should work,” “because the common interests, the concerns of all people, elude the public. The public isn’t up to dealing with them.”

Perhaps academics, and the owners of international corporations, want the public to think that that’s the way things are — that the aristocracy (who control the corporations and endow the colleges, etc.) aren’t the cause and source and boss of the propaganda-business, and that instead the public’s own stupidity and gullibility are the cause and source of that business. That’s blame-the-victim thinking. However, that view of the matter came actually from Chomsky, not at all from Lippmann.

So, perhaps people who are gullible enough to be reading magazines such as Prospect, or the Chronicle, believe Chomsky is a wise man, but people who understand the propaganda-business, know better. They hire and promote organizations such as Prospect magazine and individuals such as Chomsky, to “force them [the public] to consent by controlling, regimenting their minds” (via such PR agencies and professors) so as to blame the public, instead of to blame the people who actually hire the people who manipulate the public: the aristocracy.

How exquisite a deception is this? Is Chomsky really so skilled an example of this “specialized class,” of persons who possess “that rationality,” which “belongs to the cool observer,” and not to “the naive” masses? Perhaps Chomsky has deceived himself to think so. Obviously, his many admirers think so and view him as being a paradigm of these ‘truths’ — but they’re lies. Chomsky’s ‘paraphrases’ of Lippmann are not statements of Lippmann’s actually expressed views, which are, if anything, the exact opposite. Chomsky’s statements about the person who was actually the originator of the concept of the manufacture of consent were a fraudulent caricature of Lippmann, as if Chomsky had greatly improved upon Lippmann’s original presentation of the “manufacture of consent.” Consequently, Chomsky misrepresented both the person, and that person’s concept and intention.

There are many, many, other examples of Chomsky’s deceptions. For one, his championing of America’s invasion of Syria is, itself, terrific propaganda for the manufacturers of US weapons such as Lockheed Martin, and for America’s and its allies’ international oil and gas giants, and it’s propaganda for criminal US invasions and military occupations of sovereign foreign lands. Until recently, America’s invasion and occupation of Syria were relying mainly upon the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda to train and lead ‘our moderate rebels’ there to overthrow and replace Syria’s Government by one that would be selected by the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia and are the key foreign ally of America’s aristocracy. The Sauds are the people who, by selling their oil only in dollars, prop up the value of the US dollar no matter how big the US Government’s debts and trade-deficits are.

But more recently, the US military has been relying instead upon Syria’s separatist Kurds to take over in northeast Syria. Either way, it’s America’s invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Syria — an extreme violation of a nation’s sovereignty over its own territory. However, Chomsky and many other leading scholars and intellectuals (and war-industry-funded think-tanksters) encourage this international aggression by the US Government. Here’s a specific example of that, from Chomsky:

On 23 April 2018 was published in the New York Review of Books, “A Call to Defend Rojava: An Open Letter”. Chomsky was one of its signers. His name there added prestige and ‘authority’ to the proposal.

Rojava is the projected name for a breakaway Kurdish region to be taken from the existing nation of Syria, by the US and its anti-Syrian allies, and to be ruled then by the U.S.-established “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF) of the most-ethnocentric Kurds. That “Open Letter” was urging continued US military arming and training of Kurdish fighters, the SDF, to achieve this goal of a Kurdistan for Kurds, which would be like the existing Israel for Jews — that is, everyone else in the given territory would be second-class citizens; they’d be ruled by Kurds there, like in Israel by Jews. Rojava would be an apartheid state, like Judaic Israel is, and White South Africa was.

This letter, signed by Chomsky, demanded that the US “continue military support for the SDF,” and the letter asserted that “the Kurdish-led forces had established an oasis, unique in Syria, of local self-government, women’s rights, and secular rule.” That’s false. Secular rule and women’s rights wouldn’t be “unique in Syria,” but instead the same as under Syria’s present Government. The two links in that demand within the letter, are links that are in the letter itself, and both links are to articles that were written by neoconservatives — proponents of American conquest of foreign lands.

Syria’s Government already provides, and has long-established (not only in its customs but in its laws), both women’s rights and secular rule. However, a Western (US-allied, in this case Jordanian) poll of Syrian women found that four fifths of women said that “the social norms in Syria truly impede women’s success.” The same percentage might be found in Kurdish areas of Syria. The “social norms” in Syria were not established by the Government but by tribal and religious traditions that go back for centuries, and even for millennia.

Syria’s Constitution, however, asserts that

The state shall provide women with all opportunities enabling them to effectively and fully contribute to the political, economic, social and cultural life, and the state shall work on removing the restrictions that prevent their development and participation in building society.”

It also says:

Citizens shall be equal in rights and duties without discrimination among them on grounds of sex, origin, language, religion or creed.”

Although some Syrians (including some Kurdish ones) want Islamic (Sharia) law, and most of the fighters who have been backed by the US Government to overthrow Syria’s Government are of that religious type (jihadists — fighters based on religious reasons and favoring religion-based laws), Syria is the most secular of all Arabic countries; and even the polling in Syria by Western polling organizations has shown consistently that the secular Bashar al-Assad would easily win any free and fair election there.

Furthermore, Table 26 of the July 2015 Orb International poll of Syrians asked Syrians for “the reason that explains the presence of ISIL?” (“ISIL” is synonymous with ISIS and Daesh.) And 82% of Syrians said “ISIL is US foreign manufacture.” That was the highest percentage for any explanation. In Table 20, the other options were also shown, and the closest ones were 59% for “widespread sectarian politics in the Arab countries and in Turkey,” and then 55% for “ISIL is some Arab regimes manufacture” — presumably referring in that case to the Sauds, especially since Turkey wasn’t included in that particular option (it’s not Arab) and yet 55% is nearly as high as the 59% (which did include Turkey — along with“the Arab countries” — as being a cause for ISIL’s being in Syria).

So, Syrians apparently know the truth about that matter, even if Americans (such as Chomsky) don’t. The US Government is the main source of their war, and “sectarian politics in the Arab countries and in Turkey” also contributed to it. In other words: the US Government has taken advantage of those local “sectarian politics” in order to conquer Syria. The US is even more unpopular among Syrians than is the Saud family, and this is the reason why the US Government was trying to get the Sauds to run Syria. The US Government has a bad reputation in almost every Muslim-majority land, but especially in Syria and in Iran (neither of which that US Pew poll even sampled), both of which the US Government hopes to conquer.

In a 26 September 2018 interview with The Intercept, Chomsky said of “the Kurdish areas — Rojava” that “They have the one part of Syria which is succeeded in sustaining a functioning society with many decent elements. And the idea that they should be subjected to an attack by their bitter enemies the Turks, or by the murderous Assad regime I think anything should be done to try to prevent that.” Chomsky there certainly disrespects Syrian national sovereignty, and despises the non-sectarian President of that country, who shares the view (which repeated polling in Syria has shown to be the view of the vast majority of Syrians), that Syria is and must remain a secular and multi-ethnic country. The goal of breaking Syria up into ethnic enclaves has circulated ever since at least the 1950s within the CIA, RAND Corporation, and Israel. However, Obama’s goal was instead to have the royal Saud family control Syria. But that plan had already failed even before Trump became the US President.

As to the reality regarding the Kurds versus the Government, it’s tragic. Bashar al-Assad and Syria’s highly secular ruling Baath Party (which existed long before the Assad family rose to its leadership) have faced only bad options there. Propagandists of the sinister type (such as Chomsky) take advantage of that fact. The northwest Syrian city of Afrin is the best example of this reality. On 7 June 2018, Britain’s pro-US-empire (or “neoconservative”) Guardian newspaper headlined “‘Nothing is ours anymore’: Kurds forced out of Afrin after Turkish assault: Many who fled the violence January say their homes have been given to Arabs”.

The article was true, except that it ignored the key fact, that the Arabs whom Syria’s Government had transferred into the Kurdish-rebel-run city of Afrin and who now were taking it over, were jihadists who had been defeated by the Government, around the city of Ghouta, and the Government chose to offer those jihadists this relocation to Afrin in preference to the Government’s killing everyone in the pro-Sharia-law enclaves around Ghouta simply in order to destroy those jihadists there. (Syria’s Government wanted to minimize civilian casualties, and so offered jihadists this alternative, which would free non-combatant Ghoutans from their captors instead of killing them, but there was this inevitable down-side to doing that.)

So, the Government was now letting the fundamentalist-Sunnis who rejected Syria’s Government, fight in Afrin against the tribalist Kurds there who controlled that area and rejected Syria’s Government. Unfortunately, tragically, the non-tribalist Kurds likewise became dispossessed there. Wikipedia has a brief but broadly accurate description of the background of this tragedy:

Syrian Civil War
Main article: Afrin Canton

During the Syrian Civil War, Syrian government forces withdrew from the city during the summer of 2012. The Popular Protection Units (commonly known as YPG) took control of the city soon afterward.

Afrin Canton as a de facto autonomous part was declared on 29 January 2014, the town of Afrin being the administrative center. The assembly elected Hêvî Îbrahîm Mustefa prime minister, who later appointed Remzi Şêxmus and Ebdil Hemid Mistefa to work as deputies.

Between 2012 and 2018, the YPG, the official [that term ‘official’ is, however, just a CIA lie, because it was instead only de facto, which even the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia recognizes to mean non-official – EZ] defence force of the canton, was criticized for recruiting child soldiers, committing arbitrary arrests and failing to address unsolved killings and disappearances. According to the reports, the YPG and Asayish were also accused of forcibly recruiting civilians, arresting political activists and displacing more than 150,000 Arabs whose homes were later stolen and looted. Displaced Arabs accused the Kurdish security forces of imposing taxes and restrictions on the population in order force them to leave, and change the demography.

Propagandists take advantage of such tragedies, in order to deceive the public. Chomsky, a co-author of Manufacturing Consent, is an example of that — in this case manufacturing consent for US imperialism. What he has been saying about Syria is propagandizing for America’s invasion and occupation of that country. The means by which this immensely destructive invasion and occupation are done are not merely US troops training and arming the fighters, but are especially the fighters themselves, first mainly jihadists, but more recently and increasingly ethnocentric Kurds.

The results of this ‘civil war’ have been horrific. “Gallup measured negative emotions in 138 countries in 2013 by asking people whether they experienced a lot of stress, sadness, anger, physical pain, and worry the previous day, … [and found that Syria] is the only country in the world whose Negative Experience Index score exceeds its Positive Experience Index score.” Iraq was found to be almost as bad — still, even ten years after the US regime’s destruction of that country, in 2003, by an invasion based on lies.

An extraordinary journalist at a mainstream ‘news’-medium, William Arkin, quit NBC and MSNBC on January 2nd, and the independent columnist Caitlin Johnstone, headlined then “Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War”. She linked to Arkin’s email resigning from those networks. It had mentioned such unmentionables as “I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue … in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria?” But it’s not only the directly mega-corporate ‘news’-media that shape the ‘news’ this way. Johnstone aptly noted:

A journalist with NBC has resigned from the network with a statement which highlights the immense resistance that ostensibly liberal mass media outlets have to antiwar narratives, skepticism of US military agendas, and any movement in the opposite direction of [from] endless military expansionism. … Another way to say it would be that plutocrat-controlled and government-enmeshed media networks hire reporters to protect the warmongering oligarchic status quo upon which media-controlling plutocrats have built their respective kingdoms, and foster an environment which elevates those who promote establishment-friendly narratives while marginalizing and pressuring anyone who doesn’t. 

The enormous success of that manufacturing of consent for our nation’s military, has been proven conclusively, by Gallup’s constant polling of Americans on our degrees of respect, or disrespect, for the nation’s various institutions. Each and every year, the one institution that Americans respect by far the most is the military. The American institution that’s the worst of all (an engine of misery even within the United States), is also the most respected of all. That’s how enormously successful the manufacturing of consent is, in America. Can such a country be a democracy at all, or only a dictatorship? Does it resemble 1984’s “Big Brother,” and perpetual war for perpetual ‘peace’?

On 18 March 2011, a blogger at Huffington Post, David A. Love, headlined “A State of Perpetual War”, and opened:

In the George Orwell classic 1984, there is a state of perpetual war between the nations of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The enemy in the conflict is ambiguous, and the battlefield exists in an elusive and distant land. The enemy could be Eurasia one day, and Eastasia the next, but that location is really insignificant. … Before, it was the Cold War, and now it is the War on Terror. And the boogeyman du jour is Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism rather than Communism. And it doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is controlled by Democrats or Republicans.

And now, the ‘enemies’ are, yet again, Russia, and China, and North Korea, and Iran — but always anything, in order to keep the tax-money flowing to firms like Lockheed Martin, in order to provide the muscle, for firms like ExxonMobil, to be able to extract resources more profitably, from around the world.

What Chomsky is doing is in accord with the theory for selling foreign invasions and military occupations, as was set forth in his co-authored 1988 book. Chomsky has been practicing what he has become famous for condemning. (Instead of training and arming Vietnamese and other fighters, the US now is training and arming jihadist and ethnocentric fighters, such as ones led by Al Qaeda and by separatist Kurds.) And few, if any, of Chomsky’s admirers have even noticed this. His admirers have been oblivious.

Readers who may wish to explore more deeply the current and very sinister ways in which the US Government is manufacturing consent, will see an especially potent example of that, here.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/01/10/chomskys-unearned-prestige/

Read also:

and other good article on this subject by Gus....

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32242

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/18947

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30164

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35479

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From Kit Knightly

Most of us in the UK-based alternate media are familiar with the Integrity Initiative by now. A disinformation campaign funded by the foreign office through the (very dodgy sounding) Institute for Statecraft. Their job was to smear people opposing Theresa May’s government – be they foreign or domestic. The scale of the scandal hasn’t been appreciated by the public, thanks to the muteness of the mainstream media, but the foreign office using public money to have the intelligence agencies smear the opposition should be enough to bring down any government.

Thanks to some excellent work by people in the alternate media and some MPs, the Integrity Initiative’s website is currently empty “pending an investigation of data theft”. More honestly, it had become an embarrassment. They will likely disappear and then relaunch under a new name, and may indeed have already done so. For now, the Integrity Initiative is done.

Less well-known in this country is New Knowledge, a direct US-based parallel of the Integrity Initiative. They’ve been conducting “counter-propaganda” and “social media experiments” in the US since 2015, but only just hit the headlines.

A good question – we don’t really know. Their website claims to have “thousands of volunteers”. This may or may not be true – we only have three named people:

…but what a three they are. Jonathon Morgan, formerly of the State Department and Brookings Institute. Ryan Fox, formerly of military intelligence. Renee DiResta, formerly of Wall Street.

The State Department, military intelligence and Wall Street. The unholy trinity.

Obviously, some questions present themselves. Primarily, can we really trust all those “formerlies”? How did these three start this project? How do they know each other? Where does their funding come from?

We don’t know. What we do know is that, somehow, these three crazy kids got together and decided to use their money (we don’t know where they got it from) and their army of volunteers (we don’t know who they are) to “combat disinformation”. A noble goal indeed.

Let’s see how they did…

This “think tank” recently made the headlines in the US because they were caught attempting to manipulate the Alabama Senatorial election. This is not a fringe “conspiracy theory” claim – it was in the New York Times, twice.

It’s now known that New Knowledge took part in various social media-based attempts to swing the Alabama senate race in favour of Democrat Doug Jones. These efforts were varied and odd. They included creating a fake Facebook page, purporting to be a group of Baptists who supported Republican candidate Roy Moore, because they believed he would help them ban alcohol statewide. They also encouraged (and/or created) independent candidates from the conservative right, in efforts to split the Republican vote.

We don’t know what impact it had – but Jones did win a very narrow victory over Moore (fewer than 22,000 votes).

However, this was – by far – the most important facet of this story:

It involved a scheme to link the Moore campaign to thousands of Russian accounts that suddenly began following the Republican candidate on Twitter, a development that drew national media attention.

New Knowledge pretended to be Russians supporting a Republican candidate in order to discredit him by association. They freely admit it:

We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,”

So it seems rather than “combatting disinformation”, New Knowledge actively spreads disinformation to achieve political goals.

They are staffed by State Dept. and intelligence agency veterans, and they spread false information to swing elections. That makes them a Psy-Op:

Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. 

Mild. Disappointing. On multiple levels.

Just like the Integrity Initiative coverage in the UK, the wider implications of corruption were completely ignored. The story was always framed in terms of “fighting back against the Kremlin”, or “turning Putin’s methods against him”. The coverage focused on this being a “gift for the Kremlin” because it appeared to undermine the claims of Russiagaters (Note “appears to undermine”, rather than “undermines”).

New Knowledge (NK), of course, denied they were attempting to corrupt democracy in Alabama. Morgan called the Alabama operation an “experiment” testing the effectiveness of “Russian methods”. He claimed it was specifically “designed to have as little impact as possible”. (How you can “test the effectiveness” of something designed to have no impact is unclear to me).

No evidence is supplied to corroborate Morgan’s version of events. In fact, there’s no reason to think this is a one-off at all. This is just the one we know about. Deep State psy-ops are like ants, for every one you see…there’s a hundred you don’t. A single sighting means there’s a whole colony nearby.

All of the national media and pundits resolutely ignored the very large elephant in the very small room – NK have existed since 2015. Before the 2016 Presidential election. The NYT warns these tactics could make the 2020 election ugly – but they don’t relate it back to the 2016 election at all.

This is not about Russia “corrupting our practices” or us “employing Russian methods”, this is evidence that there NEVER WAS any “Russian interference”, that “Russia’s methods” are actually our methods. Evidence that “Russiagate” is a Deep State psy-op designed to discredit and control Donald Trump’s administration.

Rather predictably, none of the media articles takes this angle.

And, unlike the Integrity Initiative, New Knowledge’s website is very much alive and well. Outside of political corruption, there’s also levels of financial corruption. New Knowledge CEO Jonathon Morgan is also one of the builders of Hamilton 68 – a program which claims to track Russian “bot” activity. On the one hand, he works for a think-tank which fakes bot activity, on the other, he charges people for a product he claims tracks bot activity. There is, of course, a massive opportunity for fraud and corruption there.

But, far from being rebuked, sanctioned, or punished in any way – New Knowledge seems to be functioning just as before.

In fact, NBC News already ran a story claiming progressive Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being backed by the Russian “propaganda machine”

They cite New Knowledge as an expert witness.

In summary, a shadowy think-tank staffed entirely by State Department and intelligence veterans is using funding from unknown sources and volunteers of unknown identity to pretend to be Russians on social media in order to discredit politicians and political movements in the United States. This should be a Congressional hearing. But instead, it’s a back-page “oh, did you know” story.

The following are important questions that need answering:

• How is the New Knowledge group funded?
• Are they paid by the government or military?
• Who are these “thousands of volunteers”?
• Are they the US equivalent of the UK’s 77th Brigade?
• What other elections were targetted by New Knowledge (or similar) operations?

Just like the Integrity Initiative, New Knowledge works by concealing its true nature and intentions. It is layer after layer of deception and darkness. It can be beaten, the same way II was beaten – by bringing it out into the open and exposing lies to the light of truth.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/04/new-knowledge-and-the-same-old-same-...

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See also: The Age of Deceit...  

and

It is a challenge for sports leagues across the world - if play can only resume in empty stadiums, how can the atmosphere be improved?

However, not many clubs will be rushing to follow the example of FC Seoul.

The top-flight South Korean side has apologised after fans accused them of using sex dolls in the stands.

FC Seoul insisted they were "premium mannequins" rather than sex dolls - but did admit they came from a supplier that produces sex toys.

And some of the dolls were holding signs advertising sex websites - despite pornography being banned in South Korea.

On Sunday, FC Seoul played their first home match of the K League season.

The ground was empty - one of many measures designed to prevent a Covid-19 outbreak.

So before the match, a company called Dalcom offered to fill some of the empty seats, and the club agreed. In total, there were 30 mannequins - 25 of them female, and five of them male.

However, fans watching online noticed that some of the mannequins looked more like sex dolls - leading to the club apologising on Instagram and Facebook.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52702075

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"We gotta be talking about taxes. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion."

April 2019  — It was with this outburst, delivered at the annual billionaires’ get-together in Davos back in January, that Rutger Bregman went from moderately well-known Dutch historian to an overnight viral sensation and possible saviour of the world. In 2017, he had published his book Utopia For Realists, outlining proposals for a universal basic income, unlimited immigration and a shorter working week. Mostly funded by tax hikes for the super-rich. Time magazine had invited him to Davos to take part in a panel discussion on inequality. 

Bregman decided not to follow the script, ignoring the moderator’s questions and launching into an eloquent tirade against what he saw as the overriding hypocrisy of the whole event. Discussing the future of the planet without mentioning taxes, he said, felt like being  “at a firefighter convention and nobody’s allowed to talk about water”.

The clip was seen by millions. Soon he was at it again, appearing on Fox News to tell firebrand presenter Tucker Carlson that he was “a millionaire being paid by billionaires to scapegoat immigrants”. Carlson’s subsequent off-air rant at Bregman was captured on a smartphone and the clip was seen by millions online. Utopia For Realists is now an international bestseller and Bregman’s ideas, dismissed as communist fantasy just a few years ago, are seemingly being embraced by the mainstream. On a flying visit to London, he sat down to tell The Big Issue why Richard Nixon was a social democratic pioneer, why most jobs are a pointless waste of time, and why UB40 proved the case for universal basic income.

Read more: https://www.bigissue.com/latest/finance/rutger-bregman-poverty-is-not-a-personality-defect-we-need-a-basic-income/

Or Buy the BIG Issue in the streets, if available from unemployed vendors.

We mention Rutger Bregman, because of his new book, here reviewed by Andrew Anthony at the Guardian: ...

Although one of the most contested concepts in political philosophy, human nature is something on which most people seem to agree. By and large, according to Rutger Bregman in his new book Humankind — A Hopeful History, we have a rather pessimistic view – not of ourselves exactly, but of everyone else.

We see other people as selfish, untrustworthy and dangerous and therefore we behave towards them with defensiveness and suspicion. This was how the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes conceived our natural state to be, believing that all that stood between us and violent anarchy was a strong state and firm leadership.

But in following Hobbes, argues Bregman, we ensure that the negative view we have of human nature is reflected back at us. He instead puts his faith in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French thinker, who famously declared that man was born free and it was civilisation – with its coercive powers, social classes and restrictive laws – that put him in chains.

Hobbes and Rousseau are seen as the two poles of the human nature argument and it’s no surprise that Bregman strongly sides with the Frenchman. He takes Rousseau’s intuition and paints a picture of a prelapsarian idyll in which, for the better part of 300,000 years, Homo sapiens lived a fulfilling life in harmony with nature and the community, bound only by the principles of humility and solidarity.

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Rutger mentions JJ Rousseau (see http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32297 ) and Gustave Le Bon (read from top). Please visit also Diderot... and Voltaire's Candide...

Bregman's humankind prologue...

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In his book “Human Kind”, Rutger Bregman does not like Le Bon’s view of humanity… One could nearly jump on Bregman’s cart and adopt the idea than humans are basically decent. And we are. But Bregman starts with a misunderstanding of Le Bon. Le Bon talks about crowds’ behaviour in which individuals are stirred down the hole of dumb frenzy. Bregman talks about individuals pulling their socks up together in the face of adversity — such as a people being under the bombs of a blitz. There is a big difference of focus. Bregman even mentions the dreadful bombing of Dresden, after which people carried on and helped each other as if nothing had happened. He even indulges in a bit of sarcasm…

Members of the Hitler Youth rushed around tending to the homeless and the injured. A grocer jokingly hung up a sign in front of his shop: DISASTER BUTTER SOLD HERE. 

       (Okay the British humour was better.)

So Bregman thinks the Brits were funnier in the face of wrecking bombing… : MORE OPEN THAN USUAL (sign by shop owner whose premises have been wrecked)… OUR WINDOWS ARE GONE, BUT OUR SPIRITS ARE EXCELLENT. COME AND TRY THEM.” (sign of pub shaken)… 

Yes people do their best to see and do the best in survival mode. BUT THIS ISN’T A SITUATION OF CROWD. This a situation of "a people"… We explain this in the article at top but we need to reiterate the caper. Without the ability of crowds being stirred into becoming armies going to war, we would remain decent. And nowadays we even can stir a virtual crowd of people on the internet. Yet we know that we are constantly push to think that war is inevitable, one way or the other. We "need" to think "just war" and have fodder because... we don't like the other guy who seems to be sabre-rattling as well. These days we equip our fodder with complex gizmos, but our savage aggressive dog-bark is the same as the dogs barking to stir a pack of dogs (a crowd) — to return to their origins, the wolves — and become frenzied.

This is often the problem of “wild dogs” in the Australian centre. Individually, the dogs can behave decently. In a pack "they will steal babies". A crowd can be stirred to send Jesus to death, while people in adversity will help each other, mostly. And there are degrees of adversity, in which some people will behave like bastards...

I sometimes (too often) re-read my views and those of writers such as Bregman's, just to make sure I did not misread or made undue comment. I hope that I am still correct on this one: Bregman started with the wrong premise. Writing a whole book with this concept is thus crappy, despite his good intentions. But he is a young man and has a publisher — plus a crowd of idealistic admirers in the media that do not know better. I am an old kook with a satirical bend on a small website, who pushes ideas to their limits by mostly using dead philosophers' memories. Modern philosophers are often below par and are still too much in fluid modes, like Bregman.

Unde rigent setis mihi crura et pectora villis… 

Quid mihi reddat ager quaeris, Line, Nomentanus? 

Hoc mihi reddit ager: te, Line, non video.

Ah ah!

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