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Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain. From John Pilger in London.

On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.

But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistle blowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.

The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much if not most of it is pure propaganda.

The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Putin is evil, “a Nazi like Hitler”, salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia – tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex CIA propagandist who now speaks for the US State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the US Government”.

The no-evidence rule also applies in London. The British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who spent £500,000 of public money flying to Australia in a private plane to warn the Canberra government that both Russia and China were about to pounce,  offered no evidence. Antipodean heads nodded; the “narrative” is unchallenged there. One rare exception, former prime minister Paul Keating, called Truss’s warmongering “demented”.

Truss has blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian foreign minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh – until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia. Read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.

This entire farce, recently starring Boris Johnson in Moscow playing a clownish version of his hero, Churchill, might be enjoyed as satire were it not for its wilful abuse of facts and historical understanding and the real danger of war.

Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by Barack Obama’s “point person” in Kyiv, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbas, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.

Overseen by CIA director John Brennan in Kyiv, “special security units” coordinated savage attacks on the people of Donbas, who opposed the coup. Video and eyewitness reports show bussed fascist thugs burning the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa, killing 41 people trapped inside. The police are standing by. Obama congratulated the “duly elected” coup regime for its “remarkable restraint”.

In the US media the Odessa atrocity was played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”.

Professor Stephen Cohen, acclaimed as America’s leading authority on Russia, wrote, “The pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during world war two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other ‘impure’ citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s …

“The police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”

Today, neo-Nazi Ukraine is seldom mentioned. That the British are training the Ukrainian National Guard, which includes neo-Nazis, is not news. (See Matt Kennard’s Declassified report in Consortium 15 February). The return  of violent, endorsed fascism to 21st-century Europe, to quote Harold Pinter, “never happened … even while it was happening”.

On 16 December, the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism”. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.

Almost every Russian knows that it was across the plains of Ukraine’s “borderland” that Hitler’s divisions swept from the west in 1941, bolstered by Ukraine’s Nazi cultists and collaborators. The result was more than 20 million Russian dead.

Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism. They are:

– NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)

– NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.

– Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.

– the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.

– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West. But who understands their significance in Britain? What they are told is that Putin is a pariah and a threat to Christendom.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians, under economic blockade by Kyiv for seven years, are fighting for their survival. The “massing” army we seldom hear about are the thirteen Ukrainian army brigades laying siege to Donbas: an estimated 150,000 troops. If they attack, the provocation to Russia will almost certainly mean war.

In 2015, brokered by the Germans and French, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France met in Minsk and signed an interim peace deal. Ukraine agreed to offer autonomy to Donbas, now the self declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Minsk agreement has never been given a chance. In Britain, the line,  amplified by Boris Johnson, is that Ukraine is being “dictated to” by world leaders. For its part, Britain is arming Ukraine and training its army.

Since the first Cold War, NATO has effectively marched right up to Russia’s most sensitive border having demonstrated its bloody aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and broken solemn promises to pull back.  Having dragged European “allies” into American wars that do not concern them, the great unspoken is that NATO itself is the real threat to European security.

In Britain, a state and media xenophobia is triggered at the very mention of “Russia”. Mark the knee-jerk hostility with which the BBC reports Russia. Why? Is it because the restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy? Certainly, we deserve better.

www.johnpilger.com

 

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/war-in-europe-and-the-rise-of-raw-propaganda/

 

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hate...

Hate crimes against Asian Americans mushroomed over the past two years. According to the Guardian, they jumped 567 percent in San Francisco since 2021, and you don’t have to look far to find out why. The main reason is, quite simply, incessant China-bashing in the mainstream media. The anti-China hysteria has spread like measles.

This propaganda campaign was kicked off by Trump in his last year in office with absurd, dangerous and bombastic claims that China, perhaps deliberately, caused covid. The anti-China hysteria spread like measles. Now the American right-wing deploys Nazi tropes against the Chinese – a repulsive example was a January 25 Washington Times article headlined “Chinese Communist Party Termites Are Everywhere in the U.S.” With Nazi poison like this circulating through red-blooded American veins, can war fever be far behind?

Meanwhile news industry giants, many serving as pentagon mouthpieces, are totally onboard with this media blitzkrieg. One of the most atrocious instigators is the New York Times. Take its so-called coverage of China’s superior covid policies, “reporting” so slanted you could roll a truckload of innuendos down it.

Unlike the incompetent, murderous, free-market, anti-public health non-system in the U.S., which has killed 900,000 people in a population of 330 million, China, population 1.4 billion, has contained covid deaths to a mere several thousand. These statistics reflect very poorly on our vaunted capitalist arrangement. Indeed, many Americans have been shocked by the comparison of their inept, homicidal health care scheme to communism’s stellar success. So, in jumps the Times January 13 with a crude philippic, trashing China for saving lives from the virus and, drumroll…you got it, suggesting China’s Zero Covid policy can be compared to the Holocaust.

So, time to focus, people. China saves millions of lives, while the U.S. casually murders nearly a million, and how do our media moguls hide this? Easy. Trot out the Holocaust, degrade it yet again, and say that China’s miraculous public health achievement in fact resembles one of the worst genocidal crimes in human history. What’s true of the Times holds true of almost all U.S. and Western media: they will distort facts till they’re blue in the face to conceal the negligent homicide central to our corporate-controlled response to a plague. They are allergic to shame.

Not surprisingly, screams of anti-China outrage nearly drown out coverage of the Beijing Olympics. It’s almost impossible to find an Olympics story that doesn’t take time out to smear China, with approving nods at the staggeringly hypocritical western diplomatic boycott. Or those fatuous meditations called opinion pieces on the defects of this year’s Olympics, because, well, China. Of course. And if you resist this vacuous, paternalistic nonsense you’re a dupe of Xi Jinping, and you probably support the genocide of the Uyghurs – a Chinese Muslim minority whose suspected deaths at the hands of their government don’t even come close to the numbers of Muslims the U.S. killed in Iraq. Or you’re a traitor who approves of the communist oppression of Taiwan, which, at the rate we’re going, will soon be a U.S. protectorate, kind of a Puerto Rico in the East China Sea. So take that!

Of course, this hatred and mendacity infected the culture some time ago. “A new Gallup poll finds that American public opinion on China and Russia has crashed to all time lows,” reported Alan MacLeod in Mint Press News back in March of 2021. “Only 20 percent of Americans hold favorable views toward China.” This is called manufacturing consent. In this case, the anti-China propaganda juggernaut succeeded. Things have not improved since March.

And they were pretty bad then. That was when the “spa shooter” slaughtered six women of Asian descent in Atlanta. As Korean-American Dem representative Andy Kim from New Jersey told the Washington Post last month, regarding anti-Asian hate crime stats, “Just the fact that so many people in our communities in 2021 and 2022 are experiencing that hate – it’s alarming.” According to the Post January 29, “Stop AAPI Hate, a California-based advocacy organization, tallied more than 10,000 incidents targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from March 2020 through September 2021.”

The nauseating Washington Times article stirred a toxic mish-mash of racism and red-scare delirium. “We are ignoring the terrible danger the CCP is orchestrating in our country. Think termites…One telling insight is the conviction of Harvard chemistry department chair Charles Lieber.”  The article then elaborates on the 2020 -‘22 federal pursuit of the luckless Lieber, victim of the U.S. government’s prosecutorial zeal in ferreting out academics who do what academics do, namely collaborate with each other. The Washington Times breathlessly pants that “dozens of U.S. universities have partnerships with China.” Well, duh. Until Trump decided to grab frenzied headlines by defaming the Chinese, the fact that China was the U.S.’s biggest trading partner generated cordial relations and, well, fraternal academic bonds.

“The CCP has adopted a ‘Made in China 2025’ mission,” the Washington Times hyperventilates, then goes on to list the ways those supposedly devious Asiatics stab freedom-loving Amuricans in the back. But fortunately, the Justice Department under Biden had a minor fit of rationality. On January 20, the AP reported that the DOJ dropped its feeble case against MIT professor Gang Chen, charged with “concealing research ties to the Chinese government.”

DOJ’s retreat here is, according to the AP, “a further setback to the Justice Department’s pursuit of academics in the U.S. accused of concealing research relationships with China.” Gee, I wonder why they might hesitate to reveal those relationships, now practically considered proof of treason, but only so recently, before Trump’s witchhunt, regarded as, I dunno, normal and routine.

Where does all this lead? Well, “news” campaigns of national vilification usually culminate in violence. Think Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Korea, Syria, for starters. So now would be a good time for our overheated press to step back, take a deep breath and chill. Because no person of marginal sanity wants another genocide, namely World War III with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan. And if that day comes, the media will not resist. In fact, it would doubtless be in cahoots, war-whooping and enthusiastically egging on politicos and military bigwigs to lethal aggression. (Incidentally, that genocide would include tens of millions of Americans and the same number of Chinese, so the stakes are pretty freaking high).

You doubt this probable media behavior? Just look at the most recent and utterly revolting journalistic display vis a vis Russia and Ukraine. If it was up to our print and TV reporters and other pusillanimous armchair-generals, American troops would have boots on the ground in Kiev. After all, when white house spokeswoman Jen Psaki won herself the Colin Powell liar of the decade award by rummaging around in the “Iraq has WMDs” war storage room and implying February 2 that Russia could use chemical weapons, who among our fearless reporters asked, uh, what was her substantiation? I didn’t hear anyone. Did you?

When state department spokesman Ned Price tried February 3 to palm off some hogwash about the Russians concocting a false flag video with crisis actors and fake corpses, there was one, count ‘em, one, brave reporter from the AP, Matt Lee, who dared ask “What’s your evidence?” Price didn’t have any. He merely repeated the allegation. As the clip of this exchange went globally viral, with Lee comparing the false flag claptrap to “Alex Jones territory,” Price resorted to a series of superior, snotty sneers, betraying the “I’m better than you” attitude for which the Dems were so beloved in 2016 that they lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.

You think the Dems could do that again? The problem is they really do believe they are incomparable. And if they can’t control their arrogance, the odds of Trump or a Trump wannabe happening again increase exponentially. And so far, no, they can’t control their arrogance. Just look at their high-handed approach to nuclear-armed Russia.

Moscow wants Kiev to be neutral and not join NATO, because it doesn’t want U.S. weapons on its border. The U.S. snorts in derision that everybody has a sacred right to join NATO and threaten the Kremlin. The U.S. will never negotiate away that right divinely bestowed by the exceptional nation. Humility? Negotiations? Give and take? The higher order of being in charge in Washington today doesn’t stoop to that.

So the only thing more imbecilic than liberal anti-Russia war lust is far-right hand-wringing over the U.S. throwing Russia and China into each other’s arms. News flash: the U.S. already did that, years ago. Get over it. China and Russia are now “more than allies.” They may soon have a mutual defense treaty. You reap what you sow.

Overall with China, the media assault has progressed more slowly that the latest attack on Russia, but that’s not for want of steady incitement. The news biz has built up to this since Obama’s deadly pivot to Asia. If the New York Times can confidently invoke the Holocaust as somehow parallel to China’s splendid public health successes, there is no depth to which our news outfits won’t sink, as they ballyhoo their tinsel patriotism by ganging up on official enemies. Such oleaginous displays of their Amerika uber alles bona fides are beyond habitual, they’re automatic. That New York Times article with its idiotic insinuations was a disgrace. Unfortunately, if past journalistic practice is any guide, you can expect more where that came from.

 

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

 

This article is reproduced with permission from CounterPunch of February 11, 2022

(The same story is true of the racism and bigotry of Australian mainstream media -our White Man’s Media-John Menadue)

 

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/eve-ottenberg-bigotry-unboundthe-us-medias-anti-china-propaganda-blitz/

 

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