Tag Archives: alternative media

Western Elites Decrying ‘Populism’ Betrays Fear of Democracy

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By Finian Cunningham

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

A new dreaded word has entered into official Western media speak: “Populism”. Political parties and governments which are deemed to be illegitimate are invariably labeled with the prefix “populist”. There is a vague implication that “populist” parties are imbued with disreputable politics of xenophobia, racism, nationalism and even fascism.

But who is doing the “deeming” here? It is establishment political parties and politicians who have the advantage of establishment news media organizations conveying their words and terminology.

Take French President Emmanuel Macron. He may have coined a new political party, En Marche, but he is nevertheless a politician very much of the prevailing Western establishment. He is pro-European Union as it currently operates, albeit with reforming tweaks; he is pro-NATO, pro-Atlanticist; and pro-neoliberal economic policies.

Recently, Macron decried the rise of “populist” parties across Europe. He compared them to the spread of “leprosy” and claimed they were posing a morbid threat to the conventional order of politics. Macron was referring in particular to the new coalition government in Italy, comprising the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the League.

The French leader could also have been referring to any number of governments as seen in Austria, Hungary and other Central European states which, like the new Italian government, have challenged the EU’s official stance overEU irregular migration into the bloc.

In this context, the word “populist” as used by Macron and other establishment politicians has the connotation of “racist” or “inhumane” owing to the opposition towards the uncontrolled influx of people from outside Europe.

The “populist” prefix is often used alongside the term “far-right”. Again, the implication is that somehow the largely newcomer parties are something that should be abhorred because they are tarnished with alleged proclivities towards fascism and authoritarianism.

To reinforce that implied demonization, it is often cited by Western establishment politicians and media that the “populist” parties in Europe are aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, if not stealthily bankrolled by the Kremlin.

American President Donald Trump also qualifies as “populist” according to the US political and media establishment. Again, the word is loaded to infer a uniquely noxious quality in the Trump presidency and his supporters, in the same way that Democrat presidential rival Hillary Clinton once haughtily denigrated Trump and his voter base as “deplorable”. It’s a way of sanitizing the establishment from any past, and far greater, sins.

The P-word does not always mean “rightwing nationalism”. The recent elected Mexican President, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been described in Western media as a “leftwing populist”.

In Italy, the main ruling coalition party, the Five Star Movement, headed by Luigi Di Maio, is associated with leftwing social policy.

Parties and politicians deemed to be “populist” are eclectic and defy an easy categorization, as their detractors would perhaps like to assign them. Certainly, there is a strong common stance of being opposed to uncontrolled immigration. But it is too simplistic to explain such a stance as merely xenophobic or racist.

There are legitimate and reasonable concerns that the issue of large-scale immigration has been exploited by ruling establishments and their ideological backers as a way to undermine national sovereignty and workers’ rights, from the consequent lowering of wages and employment conditions.

There is also the legitimate concern in Europe that the migration phenomenon has been largely created by illegal wars pursued by the US and its European NATO allies. Why should European member states and ordinary taxpayers have to incur financial and cultural integration problems that have been largely manufactured by ruling elites who have never been held to account for their criminal wars?

So-called populist parties are also opposed to the seemingly slavish adherence by the European political establishment to neoliberal capitalism. There is a legitimate popular backlash to economic policies which are oppressive and destructive, and whose sole priority seems to be satisfying the profits of Big Business and transnational capital. Why should European governments be held in hock to fiscal rules and debt limitations set arbitrarily by institutions seemingly under the diktat of private banks?

There are several fundamental issues that form a groundswell of popular opposition towards the conventional ways of governance, both in Europe and the US. The failings of neoliberal capitalism and its rich-get-richer racket is surely top of the grievance list. So too is relentless, irrational militarism by Western governments, unleashing illegal wars and massive refugee problems, as well as stoking unnecessary hostility towards other powers like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The conventional politics, that is, the ruling establishments and their dutiful news media, are increasingly seen as incompetent, if not bankrupt. The establishment across Western countries has lost legitimacy and “moral authority” in the eyes of masses of people. That dwindling authority of the ruling class in Western states is the real, morbid concern.

One factor for this is the growth of global communications and “alternative” media sources, which Western publics are availing of to inform themselves independently from the old information monopolies that served the established order. That is why the “problem” of alleged “Russian influence” has been invented. In a desperate gambit to distract the masses from noticing the real problem, which is the crumbling of legitimacy for the Western establishment and its obedient political parties.

The looming fear among the ruling order is the ever-growing dissent among the populace. It is a fear of their own inherent failing and impending doom in the face of democratic challenge to power.

It is not so much that Trump or the new Italian government or Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, and so on, represent a vanguard for renewed democracy. These changes are merely symptoms of a deeper popular opposition to the established way of conducting politics – the order that has prevailed for most of the seven-decade period following the Second World War.

There has always been a wariness among ruling elites on both sides of the Atlantic towards a genuine democratic order breaking out, as Noam Chomsky discusses in his book ‘Deterring Democracy’. Western elites have typically viewed the masses as “rabble rousers” who are deemed to be “incapable” of governing society in the “proper way” that benefits the elites, protects their profits and property, and safeguards their imperial war-making overseas.

This underlying tension about the control of political power in Western societies encapsulates the present historical juncture where the word “populist” is being increasingly deployed. It is a term of disparagement by a failing Western establishment. What the failed order is trying to do is divert genuine popular challenge by painting it as something uncouth, vulgar, noxious, or manipulated by foreign enemies like Russia.

As American political analyst Randy Martin notes: “Populism is a convenient term for those in power who seek to isolate those who would want to share, or worse, take that power.”

When you think of the original meaning of the word – “the people” – it is starkly revealing what is really at stake for those elites who wield the “populist” term as a disparagement.

Social Media Behemoths Sweep Alternative News into the Memory Hole

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By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Another Day in the Empire

The squabbling between self-identified progressives and conservatives continues as social media transforms itself into a news, information, and opinion gatekeeper.

All information that contradicts the establishment narrative will either be downgraded into obscurity or excluded outright on social media.

Take for instance ThinkProgress, the Soros-financed news website, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund welded to the infrastructure of the Democrat party. On May 2, it complained that a bias study at Facebook will be run by conservatives, that is to say establishment Republicans, notably former Arizona Congress critter Jon Kyl.

ThinkProgress believes there is no such thing as bias aimed at conservatives—it’s the liberals who are routinely downgraded at Facebook while so-called conservatives are free to post what progressives characterize as an evil and poisonous ideology.

According to Libby Watson at Splinter News, conservatives are involved in “grift,” flimflamming poor Mark Zuckerberg with untrue claims of bias against the likes of Breitbart News.

It’s all part of a never ending and hugely counterproductive “culture war” that has raged between the ostensible right and left going on thirty years now. Ms. Watson manages to squeeze identity politics into her screed.

“The conservative movement has done a remarkable job over the last half century to bellow and bully its way into having its most ridiculous and reality-divorced concerns taken seriously,” she writes. “It lies about and distorts everything: about tax cuts, about Benghazi and her emails, about immigration, about healthcare, about Diamond and Silk. The further Facebook descends down the path of letting that screaming white face of faux outrage dictate how they run their platform, the harder it’s going to be for them to get away from them.”

The progressive news website Common Dreams complains it has weathered “significant drops in traffic since Google and Facebook began changing algorithms and talking openly about their new attempts to control the kind of news content users see. According to internal data and Google Analytics, traffic to Common Dreams from Google searches fell by 34 percent after the powerful search giant unveiled its new search protocol in April 2017.”

Meanwhile, on the other side of the yawning divide, Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, rallied around 60 conservatives and fired off an open letter to the social media giants demanding transparency, clarity on the definition of hate speech, equality for conservatives, and respect for the First Amendment.

“Social media censorship and online restriction of conservatives and their organizations have reached a crisis level,” the open letter states. “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s hearings on Capitol Hill only served to draw attention to how widespread this problem has become. Conservative leaders now have banded together to call for equal treatment on tech and social media.”

Both liberals and conservatives are missing the point.

Facebook and Google will continue and enlarge the effort to gatekeep information that does not jive with the establishment narrative, be it from the right or left.

The internet and web upended the establishment’s carefully constructed propaganda machine—the CIA’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” under its Operation Mockingbird beginning in the early 1950s—deeply embedded within corporate media.

Beginning with Friendster, MySpace, and like projects in the early 2000s and eventually morphing into the corporate behemoths Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, social media platforms have extended the reach of alternative media, much to the displeasure of the establishment. Its preferred propaganda conduits have withered and this has seriously hampered its ability to control the narrative.

Both the right and left need to nurture their own social media platforms and drive traffic there.

Of course, this will not be as effective as plugging into the massive matrix of social connectivity provided by the corporate tech giants, but the alternative is to be marginalized and eventually swept into the memory hole as the context of “extremism” narrows and constricts expression, excluding all but the most token disagreement with the establishment narrative.

However, I’m not sure we’re up to it.

The elite has done a remarkable job of using the time tested divide and conquer concept, endlessly pitting the so-called right against the amorphously defined left and vice versa. Liberals and conservatives continue to fight over frivolous ideological points as the funny money asset-driven economy prepares to implode and the mission of infinity war expands to the point where it endangers life on planet Earth.

Spies, Lies and War Propaganda: The Making of Another Conspiracy Theory

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

What is insane is how Western governments and the mainstream media (MSM) is that they can tell you that they have the proof that their enemies committed an act of war, or how they interfere in the affairs of other countries but cannot release the evidence due to national security issues or they just outright know in their gut instincts that their enemies did whatever it is that they did, and then they expect us to believe them. While we in the alternative media can show you mountains of evidence including government documents, photos, quotes from world leaders, reports and analysis from respected journalists and researchers from all over the world who represent the facts, yet we are called conspiracy theorists by the same Western governments and the MSM.

Russia is now accused of poisoning another former Russian spy, this time it’s Sergei Skripal (the late Alexander Litvinenko was the last victim) and his daughter Yulia who was living in the Salisbury section of the UK with a military-grade nerve agent produced by..drum roll, please… Russia! How convenient, especially during a time when the U.S. and its allies accuse the Syrian government of launching chemical attacks on civilians, but in reality (which has been proven time and time again) it was the US-backed terrorists or who they call the “rebel forces” who launched the chemical attacks. It’s amazing how Western governments and the MSM constantly link their adversaries to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). For example, The New York Times published an article on February 27th titled ‘U.N. Links North Korea to Syria’s Chemical Weapons Program’ suggesting that North Korea shipped supplies to Syria to produce chemical weapons due to an investigation by United Nations:

North Korea has been shipping supplies to the Syrian government that could be used in the production of chemical weapons, United Nations experts contend.

The evidence of a North Korean connection comes as the United States and other countries have accused the Syrian government of using chemical weapons on civilians, including recent attacks on civilians in the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta using what appears to have been chlorine gas.

The supplies from North Korea include acid-resistant tiles, valves and thermometers, according to a report by United Nations investigators. North Korean missile technicians have also been spotted working at known chemical weapons and missile facilities inside Syria, according to the report, which was written by a panel of experts who looked at North Korea’s compliance with United Nations sanctions

O.K. So now North Korea is shipping supplies to help the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad to produce chemical weapons? What is interesting about the accusation is that The New York Times reviewed the report, but would not release it themselves. The authors and other members of the UN security council would also not comment on the report:

The possible chemical weapons components were part of at least 40 previously unreported shipments by North Korea to Syria between 2012 and 2017 of prohibited ballistic missile parts and materials that could be used for both military and civilian purposes, according to the report, which has not been publicly released but which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Neither the report’s authors nor members of the United Nations Security Council who have seen it would comment, and neither would the United States’ mission to the international agency. It is unclear when, or even whether, the report will be released

Of course they are not even sure if they would release the report to the public because it would most likely be criticized by the alternative media who would view it as a propaganda plot to demonize Kim Jung-Un. We can call The New York Times article for what it really is, and that is fake news. North Korea would not get involved in a Middle East conflict because it would not be in their interest, politically or economically. It would give the US and South Korean governments more reasons to threaten North Korea with a military strike if something like that was true, but it’s not. Kim Jung -Un does not have a relationship with ISIS and other terrorist groups who have been launching chemical attacks throughout Syria since the start of the conflict, the U.S. and its allies do. So it’s ludicrous accusation.

On March 12th, British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke at the House of Commons about the Skripal incident in Salisbury, UK:

It is now clear that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia. This is part of a group of nerve agents known as ‘Novichok’.

Based on the positive identification of this chemical agent by world-leading experts at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down; our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent and would still be capable of doing so; Russia’s record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations; the Government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal

The case of Sergei Skripal is becoming another farfetched conspiracy theory just like the Alexander Litvinenko case. If you remember Alexander Litvinenko who allegedly drank a cup tea at a business meeting with two other Russians (who were charged with his murder) which contained a fatal dose of Polonium-210. The editorial director of Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo wrote an article on the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko titled ‘The Craziest Conspiracy Theory of Them All: The British government’s report on the death of Alexander Litvinenko reads like a bad thriller’:

To those of us who grew up during the cold war years, it’s just like old times again: Russian plots to subvert the West and poison our precious bodily fluids are apparently everywhere. Speaking of poisoning plots: the latest Russkie conspiracy – and the most imaginative by far – was the alleged assassination by poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko , a former agent of the Russian intelligence services who fled to the West to become a professional anti-Russian propagandist and conspiracy theorist with a talent for the improbable. According to his fantastic worldview, the many terrorist attacks that have occurred in Russia have all been committed by … Vladimir Putin. Aside from championing the Chechen Islamo-terrorists who actually committed these crimes, Litvinenko’s stock-in-trade was an elaborate conspiracy theory in which he regularly accused Putin of blowing up Russian apartment buildings and murdering schoolchildren and then diverting attention from his own nefarious plots by blaming those lovable Chechens. Not very believable – unless one is predisposed to believe anything, so long as it casts discredit on those satanic Russians.

The conspiracy theory promulgated by the British government – and now memorialized in this official report – surpasses anything the deceased fantasist might have come up with. According to the Brits, Litvinenko was poisoned on British soil whilst imbibing a cup of tea spiked with a massive dose of radioactive polonium-210 – and, since Russia is a prime source of this rare substance, and since the Russians were supposedly out to get Litvinenko, the FSB – successor to the KGB – is named as the “probable” culprit.

Looking at the report, one has to conclude that they don’t make propaganda the way they used to: the certitude of, say, a J. Edgar Hoover or a Robert Welch has given way to the tepid ambiguity of Lord Robert Owen, the author of this report, whose verdict of “probably” merely underscores the paucity of what passes for evidence in this case

Raimondo made his case with a common-sense approach to the conspiracy theory:

To begin with, if the Russians wanted to off Litvinenko, why would they poison him with a substance that left a radioactive trail traceable from Germany to Heathrow airport – and, in the process, contaminating scores of hotel rooms, offices, planes, restaurants, and homes? Why not just put a bullet through his head? It makes no sense.

But then conspiracy theories don’t have to make sense: they just have to take certain assumptions all the way to their implausible conclusions. If one starts with the premise that Putin and the Russians are a Satanic force capable of anything, and incompetent to boot, then it’s all perfectly “logical” – in the Bizarro World, at any rate.

The idea that Litvinenko was a dangerous opponent of the Russian government who had to be killed because he posed a credible threat to the existence of the regime is laughable: practically no one inside Russia knew anything about him, and as for his crackpot “truther” theories about how Putin was behind every terrorist attack ever carried out within Russia’s borders – to assert that they had any credence outside of the Western media echo chamber is a joke. So there was no real motive for the FSB to assassinate him, just as there is none for the FBI to go after David Ray Griffin

To assassinate Litvinenko with a dose of radioactive polonium-210 in his cup of tea is an incredibly ridiculous allegation by both the British and American establishment. Another anti-Putin crusader is the Hudson Institute’s own senior fellow, David Satter who wrote ‘The Russian State of Murder Under Putin’ in 2016 and said:

It is now imperative not only for the West but for the future of Russia that the Litvinenko inquiry set a precedent for the objective international review of the cases of political terrorism in Russia. These include the bloody sieges at Moscow’s Dubrovka theater in 2002 and at a school in Beslan in 2004, the assassinations of journalists and opposition leaders and, above all, the deadly 1999 apartment bombings that helped bring Mr. Putin to power.

In the Litvinenko case, the alleged assassins, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, were accused by the British inquiry of slipping polonium-210 into Litvinenko’s tea. A radioactive trail was left all over London. Traces of polonium were found in Mr. Lugovoi’s hotel room, at a sushi restaurant where Litvinenko dined with the two men, and on the seat occupied by Mr. Lugovoi on a British Airlines flight from Moscow to London

Satter’s view concerning Putin’s killing machine apparatus that uses chemical weapons to silence its opposition is pure nonsense. There are many ways to murder an individual if they really wanted to, so why would they use ‘Novichok’ a nerve agent that can be traced back to Russia? Novichok was produced in the former Soviet Union and then in Russia until 1993.

So who would benefit from such an attack? Putin himself? not really, it would somehow benefit the Anglo-American establishment by continuing the demonization of the Russian government. Sergei Skripal, was a former Russian military intelligence colonel who was found guilty of passing state secrets to the U.K. and was sentenced to 13 years in prison back in 2006. If Putin really wanted Skripal dead, he would have had him executed while in custody. The Western powers including the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France want to maintain their “International Order” as Prime Minister May had mentioned in a statement she gave last Monday:

“The UK does not stand alone in confronting Russian aggression. In the last 24 hours I have spoken to President (Donald) Trump, Chancellor (Angela) Merkel and President (Emmanuel) Macron. We have agreed to cooperate closely in responding to this barbaric act and to co-ordinate our efforts to stand up for the rules based international order which Russia seeks to undermine”

So Who Could Have Possibly Poisoned Sergei Skripal and his Daughter?

On March 4th, 2018 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a public bench by a shopping centre in Salisbury by a doctor and nurse who happened to be passing by (what are the chances that happening?). It was soon discovered by a medical staff at the Salisbury District Hospital that Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent. They both remain in critical condition. Three police officers investigating the scene were also hospitalized. The poison discovered on the Skripal family was apparently ‘Novichok.’ According to a New York Times report titled ‘In Poisoning of Sergei Skripal, Russian Ex-Spy, U.K. Sees Cold War Echoes’ basically says Russia is the culprit:

With its echoes of stranger-than-fiction plots from the Cold War and earlier episodes from the Putin era, the case threatens to worsen the already tense relations between the West and a Russian government that has annexed Crimea, destabilized eastern Ukraine and propped up the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, all while being accused of disrupting elections and sowing discord within Western democracies.

“This is a form of soft war that Russia is now waging against the West,” said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament. British officials have accused the Kremlin of only one assassination on British soil in recent years, but the Russian government has been suspected of being behind numerous other mysterious deaths in Britain and elsewhere.

In Mr. Litvinenko’s case, the weapon is believed to have been a poisoned teapot later found to contain polonium 210, a radioactive isotope; his death was slow and agonizing

Russia along with several other nations are not following the globalist’s blueprint because they want their sovereignty respected and therefore it is seen by the West as a threat to its World Order. If the Russian agents did poison Sergei Skripal (which is obviously, a false accusation) with a deadly military-grade nerve agent that can spread throughout the Salisbury community and traced back to Russia, then they must be the most idiotic and most incompetent intelligence agency on planet earth. There is no evidence of the Russian government being involved in Mr. Skripal’s poisoning, in fact, it sounds like a false-flag attack by using Mr. Skripal to blame Russia. Any of the Western intelligence agencies including MI6 or the CIA could have obtained the nerve agent or something close to it in order to poison Skripal. It is also most likely that we would never find out who actually committed the crimes against Skripal and Litvinenko, but according to the West, its Russia. The Alexander Litvinenko story told by the British government and the MSM (in this case, BBC News) is like a bad thriller and so does the Sergei Skripal case. Both cases will most likely make it to the big screen in the future since many of films produced by Hollywood is based on propaganda against America’s enemies including Russia (many Hollywood films, especially since the Cold War usually portray Russia as the enemy) and recently, North Korea made it to the big screen with the 2013 film, ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ about a North Korean terrorist organization who takes over the White House (yes, another really bad thriller). Rest assured, the Sergey Skripal case as well as the murder of Alexander Litvinenko will most likely make its way to the big screen someday.

The UK government along with its Western partners are spreading far-fetched conspiracy theories, but the MSM will cover their lies and deceit and tell you that it is the alternative media who needs to be censored because we are the ones who are spreading conspiracy theories and fake news. The American and the British governments accused Saddam Hussein of having “weapons of mass destruction” which as we all know, was not only a lie, but a lie that destroyed Iraq. Sooner or later, the facts of the Sergei Skripal case will show the world who are the liars and the conspiracy theorists really are, and once again, the Anglo-American establishment and its MSM representatives would lose even more credibility. In my opinion, they lost all of their credibility a very long time ago.

Remembering Investigative Journalist Robert Parry

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Robert Parry in Washington, D.C. (AP, February 1987)

By Norman Soloman

Source: TheRealNews.com

After Robert Parry died on January 27, I asked another great investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, for some words. “I ran into Bob more than three decades ago when he was the first to warn of the Iran/Contra affair, to little avail,” Hersh replied. “He was widely seen over the next years as a critic of the mainstream media in America. That was not so. He was a critic of lousy reporting, be it in Pravda or The New York Times. He wanted every journalist, everywhere, to do the research and the interviewing that it takes to get beyond the accepted headline.”

What made Bob Parry a trailblazer for independent journalism also made him a bridge burner with the media establishment. He refused to take on faith the official story, whether from governments or news outlets. After winning acclaim, including a Polk Award, as an Associated Press reporter who broke many big stories on deadly US policies in Central America, he spent three years at Newsweek—where he saw top editors collaborating with officials of the George H.W. Bush administration on what should be shared or withheld from the public. Bob left the magazine in 1990, and soon his relations with mainstream media had a whistle-blower quality. His 1992 book Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom named names and pulled no punches.

Midway through the decade, Bob did a stint as director of the Nation Institute’s investigative unit. His writing for The Nation during 1996 included pieces about the CIA and drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras, the bankrolled power of right-wing foundations, and a seven-page expose that is chilling to read more than 30 years later—an investigative report on the Koch brothers.

In 1995, Parry launched a unique journalistic space, Consortiumnews.com, where he worked intensely as publisher, editor, and writer. For the next 22 years, Parry oversaw the website’s scrutiny of elite wisdom. His work, which included authoring six books, won the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation in 2015 and, last year, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

I got to see Bob at work up close, in 1996, when we co-wrote a series on a media darling: “Behind Colin Powell’s Legend.” During interviews, Bob was politely unrelenting. He had a methodical zest for plowing through documents, determined to “master the material.” And he was professionally generous; I wrote just a small proportion of the articles, but he insisted that I share the byline on every one.

Bob was notably non-ideological. What propelled him was a moral core and determination to follow the facts. That devotion led him to expose the lethal deceptions and machinations of Reagan-era figures like Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, and Caspar Weinberger. Three decades later, the same resolve to separate fact from spun fiction put him on a collision course with the conventional wisdom of “Russiagate.”

No one knew better than Bob Parry how intelligence agencies and major media outlets can create a cascading frenzy. Beginning in late 2016, Bob was prolific as he debunked the torrent of hyperbolic claims about Russia that became an ever-present flood across the US media landscape. Some progressive sites went from often posting his articles in 2016 to rarely or never posting them in 2017.

“For years, the mainstream, establishment media have, by their malpractices in covering US-Russian relations from Ukraine to ‘Russiagate,’ been deeply complicit in the unfolding of this new Cold War and its unprecedented dangers,” said Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a contributing editor at The Nation. “Bob Parry, very often alone, exposed those malpractices, especially those committed by the powerful New York Times and Washington Post, misreported story by misreported story, sometimes daily. For this, he was ostracized, slurred, certainly ignored by mainstream media.”

At the end of December, a week after his first stroke left him with badly blurred eyesight, Bob somehow was able to write what turned out to be his final article, brilliant and transcendent, a kind of cri de coeur that is a stunning last testament to “the journalistic principles of skepticism and evenhandedness.” Western journalists, he wrote, “now apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many ‘liberals’ who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the US intelligence community feeds us, even if we’re told to accept the assertions on faith.”

At the close of a lengthy tribute that appeared the day after his father’s death, Nat Parry wrote that, “ultimately, Bob was motivated by a concern over the future of life on Earth. As someone who grew up at the height of the Cold War, he understood the dangers of allowing tensions and hysteria to spiral out of control, especially in a world such as ours with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on the planet many times over.”

Robert Parry carried the lantern high. Now others will need to carry it on.

 

Read Robert Parry’s final article (posted 12/31/17) at https://consortiumnews.com/2017/12/31/an-apology-and-explanation/

Mainstream Media: The Evil Empire

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By Anthony Freda

Source: Medium

As it becomes increasingly clear that yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s real news, the call to kill the messengers just gets more shrill and hysterical.

The attacks on free speech with high-tech censorship campaigns and old-fashioned hit pieces in the “War on Fake News” are massive and concerted.

The book burners are starting so many fires it’s impossible to stamp them all out.

What are the horrible thought crimes committed by the alternative press?

The new media has consistently exposed the lies and crimes of our corrupt and broken institutions.

Pioneers of alt media have passionately and convincingly made the case that The Patriot Act literally reversed the gains to human liberty codified in The Bill of Rights.

Independent media dismantled the lies that were presented as the pretexts to the invasion of Iraq. The same lies aggressively promoted by Bush, Hillary Clinton, CNN and The New York Times and that resulted in the death of a million people and global chaos. By contrast, how many people have died as a result of alternative media reports? The answer is zero.

The independent press interviewed NSA whistle-blowers who accurately described how the U.S. government was illegally spying on its citizens and retaining our data, and how these whistle-blowers were being persecuted by their own government for coming forward and refusing to break the law.

This was years before anyone heard of Edward Snowden.

Amazingly, there was very little interest in these bombshell allegations in the mainstream press.

It’s hard to believe now, but in those days, people who claimed the government was spying on innocent citizens were dismissed as paranoid by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth at the NYT and CNN.

Grassroots media detailed a decade ago how police forces all over America were becoming militarized and predicted that this dangerous trend would lead to racially charged conflict on the streets of the nation. What kooks!

We have also railed against; torture, needless wars, police brutality, government corruption, the two-party duopoly, the criminality of the banksters and the end of privacy.

Now the very same mainstream media hacks who promoted the lies that lead to war in Iraq and Libya and mindlessly regurgitate whichever talking point is uploaded onto their teleprompter are gleefully assassinating what they call “fake news” using edited tape and misleading hit-pieces.

While these discredited war cheerleaders lie about why our sons and daughters are sent to die, we are bravely exposing the fraudulent casus belli they traitorously and disgracefully promote.

While these corporate spokespeople work for the interests of the oil and drug companies and political forces that pay their salaries, we risk everything to expose the crimes and scams of these same broken institutions.

We have done a great public service by exposing the deceptive, psychological methods used by the ruling elite to warp historical narratives, manipulate patriotism and manufacture consent.

By helping people to recognize and suspend their belief in propaganda and therefore their own complicity in it, the alternative media is helping to create a public awareness to the tactics our enemies use to keep us divided, steal our rights and slaughter countless innocents all over the world.

I know it’s fun and easy to call us tin-foil-hat wearers, or whatever pejorative has been chosen for you today, but let’s be clear about whose dirty work some are doing. Ironically, many are using talking-points written by deep-state operatives to ridicule the idea that the deep-state exists at all!!

Alternative media is in direct competition with the mainstream media for revenue and the MSM want to control the information we are exposed to.

The MSM is waging a concerted demonization campaign aimed at destroying some of the dominant platforms exposing the lies and crimes of their corporate and deep-state masters and many are helping them do it.

The MSM is an enemy of the truth and of the people. Friends of mine have been accused of being Russian agents in The NYT because they simply told the truth about Clinton during the campaign.

The corporate press has gone from lying to the American people to lying about the American people.

Do we have the will and power to destroy our common enemy?

Governments and corporations escalate Internet censorship and attacks on free speech

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By Andre Damon

Source: WSWS.org

The year 2018 has opened with an international campaign to censor the Internet. Throughout the world, technology giants are responding to the political demands of governments by cracking down on freedom of speech, which is inscribed in the US Bill of Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and countless international agreements.

Bloomberg, the financial news service, published a blog post titled “Welcome to 2018, the Year of Censored Social Media,” which began with the observation, “This year, don’t count on the social networks to provide its core service: an uncensored platform for every imaginable view. The censorship has already begun, and it’ll only get heavier.”

Developments over the past week include:

  • On January 1, the German government began implementation of its “Network Enforcement Law,” which threatens social media companies with fines of up to €50 million if they do not immediately remove content deemed objectionable. Both German trade groups and the United Nations have warned that the law will incentivize technology companies to ban protected speech.
  • On January 3, French President Emmanuel Macron vowed to introduce a ban during election cycles on what he called “fake news” in a further crackdown on free speech on top of the draconian measures implemented under the state of emergency. The moves by France and Germany have led to renewed calls for a censorship law applying to the entire European Union.
  • On December 28, the New York Times reported that Facebook had deleted the account of Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of the Chechen Republic, nominally because he had been added to a US sanctions list. As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, this creates a precedent for giving the US government essentially free rein to block freedom of expression all over the world simply by putting individuals on an economic sanctions list.
  • This week, Iranian authorities blocked social media networks, including Instagram, which were being used to organize demonstrations against inequality and unemployment.
  • Facebook has continued its crackdown on Palestinian Facebook accounts, removing over 100 accounts at the request of Israeli officials.

These moves come in the wake of the decision by the Trump administration to abolish net neutrality, giving technology companies license to censor and block access to websites and services.

In August, the World Socialist Web Site first reported that Google was censoring left-wing, anti-war, and progressive websites. When it implemented changes to its search algorithms, Google claimed they were politically neutral, aimed only at elevating “more authoritative content” and demoting “blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.”

Now, no one can claim that the major technology giants are not carrying out a widespread and systematic campaign of online censorship, in close and active coordination with powerful states and intelligence agencies.

In the five months since the WSWS released its findings, Google’s censorship of left-wing, anti-war, and progressive web sites has only intensified.

Even though the World Socialist Web Site‘s readership from direct entries and other websites has increased, Google’s effort to isolate the WSWS through the systematic removal of its articles from search results has continued to depress its search traffic. Search traffic to the WSWS, which fell more than any other left-wing site, has continued to trend down, with a total reduction of 75 percent, compared to a 67 percent decline in August.

Alternet.org’s search traffic is now down 71 percent, compared to 63 percent in August. Consortium News’s search traffic is down 72 percent, compared to 47 percent in August. Other sites, including Global Research and Truthdig, continue to see significantly depressed levels of search traffic.

In its statement to commemorate the beginning of the new year, the World Socialist Web Site noted, “The year 2018—the bicentenary of Marx’s birth—will be characterized, above all, by an immense intensification of… class conflict around the world.” This prediction has been confirmed in the form of mass demonstrations in Iran, the wildcat strike by auto workers in Romania and growing labour militancy throughout Europe and the Middle East.

The ruling elites all over the world are meeting this resurgence of class struggle with an attempt to stifle and suppress freedom of expression on the Internet, under the false pretence of fighting “fake news” and “foreign propaganda.”

The effort to muzzle social opposition by the working class must be resisted.

On January 16, 2018, the World Socialist Web Site will host a live video discussion on Internet censorship, featuring journalist and Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges and WSWS International Editorial Board Chairperson David North.

The discussion will explore the political context of the efforts to censor the Internet and abolish net neutrality, examine the pretexts used to justify the suppression of free speech (i.e., “fake news”), and discuss political strategies to defend democratic rights. Hedges and North will also field questions from on-line listeners.

We urge all of our readers to register to participate in this immensely important discussion, and to help publicize it to friends and co-workers.

 

The webinar will be streamed live by the WSWS on YouTube and Facebook on Tuesday, January 16 at 7:00 pm ( EST). For more information, time zone conversions and to register, click here.

 

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Saturday Matinee: Shadows of Liberty

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Synopsis from ShadowsofLiberty.org:

Shadows Of Liberty reveals the extraordinary money and power behind the news media dictating censorship, cover‐ups and corporate control.

Filmmaker Jean‐Philippe Tremblay takes an intrepid journey through the dark corridors of the American media landscape where global conglomerates call the shots. For decades their overwhelming influence has distorted journalism and compromised its values.

In highly revealing stories, renowned journalists, activists and academics give insider accounts of a broken media system. Controversial news reports are suppressed, people are censored for speaking out, and lives are shattered as the arena for public expression is turned into a private profit zone.

Tracing the story of media manipulation through the years, Shadows Of Liberty poses a crucial question: why have we let a handful of powerful private corporations write the news? We’re left in no doubt, ‘…what will save us is when we really know what’s going on, media not filtered through the lens or the microphone of a corporation.’

10 Signs Of Our Global Awakening

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By Paul A. Philips

Source: Activist Post

Since time immemorial, under the ruling thumb of the world’s dark overlords, humanity has been hacked, stymied, suppressed and coerced into submission through mind-controlling, soul-destroying atrocities. Those unable to see that just about every subject under the sun is a deception and how their family and friends are affected don’t yet realize the extent to which the dark overlords have us snugly stitched up.

However, alternative media sources tell us that people are awakening exponentially to the realization that they’re being stitched up and in the swathe of these awakened souls, more and more are playing their dutiful part in enlightening others.

So, here are 10 signs of our global mass awakening.

1. The fall and further fall of the mainstream media

Trust in the mainstream media has fallen to an all-time low and continues to plummet. Much of this has to do with an increasingly aware and disgruntled public: More and more people are able to discern a mainstream media totally lacking in integrity, thanks to the rising popularity of the independent/alternative media exposing the dishonesty.

Unlike the alternative/independent sources, the servile corporate-controlled mainstream media has been a highly effective tool used to manipulate the consensus reality of the masses for a number of powerful individuals having political and financial self-interests. A number of us know we have seen attempts by these elitist individuals controlling the mainstream media to thwart the rising popularity of the independent/alternative media through false, baseless accusations of ‘fake news.’  Indeed, it’s an attempt to discredit because it exposes the truth about the elite and reveals their hidden agendas….

Essentially, the unjust ‘fake news’ labelling of the independent/alternative media has backfired on the manipulators: Instead of achieving censorship it has given rise to further increasing support for the alternative/independent media, while the mainstream media has taken an even bigger fall. As many of us know, the real fake news exists in the mainstream media with its propaganda and mind control…

Given that these 2 paradigms cannot live side by side each other, which one will win the information war?

Besides the mainstream media, worldwide, an increasingly aware public show a growing distrust for Big Government and Big Business institutions from multiple polls.

The distrust and unpopularity implicitly expressed by the public on these crooked institutions with their resident crooks mainly come from the truth revelations put out by the alternative/independent media.

Further, this is what happens when Big Government and Big Business not only ignores the people’s voice in decision making, but also demonizes their dissension and public opinion, which only serves to fuel the public’s uprising.

3. Marches against Monsanto have intensified

There couldn’t be a better example of the public’s growing distrust in Big Business than Monsanto. As the years roll by marches against Monsanto from people of many different backgrounds all over the world have risen significantly and don’t look to be cooling down….

Although there are signs of Monsanto clawing back, in recent years earnings have plummeted. The earnings drop for the biotech company suggests a growing public disdain for their GM seeds as more and more people realize the dangers of GMO and its glyphosate herbicide.

More and more realize that Monsanto are out to patent, own and control every seed in the world. This threatens the destruction and diversity of every natural God-given seed….

4. Increasing health awareness

Although still very popular, people’s awareness of the dangers of fast food has increased, as indicated by recent erratic share prices in some of the major fast food corporations who’ve had to pull out all marketing stops to claw back on fallen share prices.

Reports indicate that last year people have shown more interest than ever in organic non-GMO healthier food options. Besides how these choices affect health, people’s increased interest and awareness has extended into concerns over the environment, animals and the workers involved in food production.

5. Increasing recognition of disinformation

People are increasingly seeing right through those various media sources with their dogmatic unhealthy skeptics, shills, trolls, pseudo-debunkers, controlled opposition agents, biasing, filtering and in-your-face lies intended to sell you the spin of disinformation to keep you ignorant, deceived and helplessly anesthetized in the matrix control system…

6. Increasing support for social media

The social media outlet has greatly contributed to our awakening. It has indeed provided a unique and effective platform for the people’s voice. No wonder the mainstream media and elitists are unpopular:  It has allowed us to spread the word on subjects such as PizzaGate and the Clinton conspiracies….

Along with the alternative/independent media, the explosive interest in the social media outlet has not only changed our views but also continues to redefine journalism and how information is shared. How this is redefining media is a subject for another piece.

Simple to say we’re in a golden age of alternative/independent and social media which has contributed greatly to our global awakening.

7. Changing viewpoint towards the ‘Conspiracy Theorist’

Another blatant indicator confirming our awakening is a change in how the term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ is now generally viewed.

Used frequently over the years in mainstream media the term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ was invented in the ’60s by the CIA (Crooks In Action). It has been used as a cover up to discredit those aware of the facts on how the dark overlords and their associates have been involved in criminal activity….

No longer generally viewed as a label to slap on crazy kooks believing Richard Nixon was a werewolf… etc… Conspiracy Theory has become more generally viewed as either conspiracy fact or at least something worth investigating rather than flatly dismissing.

For more on this see: 9 Indisputable Truths about “Conspiracy Theorists”

8. Increasing attempts to shut us up

Our global mass awakening has got the dark overlords greatly concerned as they question the effectiveness of their control systems over us. How can they deal with our awakening in growing overwhelming numbers?

Desperately, in cahoots with their associates, they’re throwing everything at us ranging from the grossly suppressive, the extremely petty, the violent and the ridiculous to try to shut us up and deny our self-expression, keep us mentally, spiritually and physically enslaved in the matrix controlling system.

9. Awakening through unknown/unforeseen processes

Our awakening goes beyond the specific and measurable: We cannot simply quantify our awakening: There are circumstances occurring on a spiritual level that go beyond our limited understanding. Such as, for example, claims have been made recently of energetic emissions from our galactic centre that could affect our spirituality and transform us….

10. Rise in local meet-up groups

As already mentioned, the Internet and social media has indeed been great for exchanging information to wake people up but what if these set ups become censored? Further, large groups, virtual or real, run the risk of infiltration for dumbing down and deliberate disinformation.

So the solution lies (in part) in the forming of local community-based in-person groups to cultivate the resistance and humanity; and local meet-up group numbers are already growing.

In conclusion

Will our mass awakening to the deception produce a turnaround — a world that makes a difference for everyone? A world where there are no predators, no controlling hierarchy, no blood-sucking vampiric slave-drivers at the top ruling the numerous enslaved at the bottom… no more fight for self-sufficiency because it’s already been achieved in the communities… etc.

It is up to us all to play our part.

 

You can read more from Paul A. Philips at his site NewParadigm.ws, where this article first appeared.