Tag Archives: U.S. Propaganda

Why the Russian Federation Recognized the Independence Movements in the Donbas

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Recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics is a direct result of U.S. efforts to contain Russian economically and militarily.

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: Black Agenda Report

“Minsk, Minsk, Minsk,” they cried after Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk. But those Western diplomats and pundits did not hear those of us in the anti-war, pro-peace and anti-imperialist movements who insisted that Minsk II was the only conceivable way out of the crisis!  

There will be reams of words attempting to provide a coherent analysis of the manufactured crisis dramatically unfolding in Ukraine, which took another unanticipated turn when Russia extended recognition to the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the territory referred to as the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. 

I will not add to that mountain of ink because, for me, the story is relatively simple. I have argued since 2015 that it was greed informed by miscalculations that drove the U.S. — with the support of European capital salivating from prospect of profits generated by gaining full control of the Ukrainian economy through the European Association agreement — to decide to overthrow the government of Viktor Yanukovych when he turned to Russia instead of surrendering Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital. 

This was the genesis of the crisis. For U.S. policymakers it did not matter that the coup government was made up of literal neo-Nazis and extremist white supremacists and antisemitic ultra-nationalists from the neo-Nazi Svoboda party — the National Socialist Party of Ukraine. 

Nor was there any concern that one of the former commanders of the Azov Battalion, a violent right-wing gang that was merged into the Ukrainian National Guard and is now being trained by the British, said that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead in a final crusade … against the Semite-led Untermenschen” (sub-humans). 

No concern because aligning with rightist elements in order to advance the economic and geostrategic interests of the U.S. state and capitalist class behind the backs of the U.S. public is nothing new. That is why it is so ironic, or perhaps contradictory, that while Democratic Party activists are mobilized to struggle against the far-right in the U.S., Biden’s Ukrainian policies are affirming once again that the neoliberal right does not mind aligning with naked fascism to advance the imperial interests of capital.  

From rightist Islamic forces to right-wing apartheid state of Israel, to anti-democratic monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), there is usually never a state too odious for the U.S. to deal with as long as there was the possibility of a buck to be made. 

That is why it is almost surreal to read U.S. propaganda messages that still frame U.S. intentions in themes that suggest a benevolent character to U.S. behavior — and getting away with it! And even among African/Black radicals who should know better, instead of educating Africans on what was in play in Ukraine with the expansion of the white supremacist NATO structure, the gangster move being made on Ukraine in order for U.S. capital to continue to assert control over the European market, and the crude attempt to divert attention away from the failures of Biden’s domestic policies — some Africans, along with elements of the white left, were more interested in having abstract discussions on the class nature of the Russian state and economy — as if there was anything to debate there! 

Like other subversive actions by the U.S. state, the destabilization and then capturing of the Ukrainian state, and the installation of a puppet government had nothing to do with any concerns for democracy. It is impossible for the U.S. to be concerned about democracy when it is the principal state undermining democracy around the world. If the U.S. were committed to upholding democratic processes, it would not have overthrown a democratically elected government in Ukraine. 

And U.S. policy certainly did not reflect any concern for human rights in Ukraine. The war that was sparked after the coup government decided to attack its own citizens in the Donbas who rejected its legitimacy resulted in thousands of Ukrainians losing their lives.

The U.S. was not concerned with the territorial integrity of Ukraine either, because it was the coup government, backed by their bosses in Washington, that forced the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine by defining them as non-Ukrainians. Ukrainian citizens in Donbas became “pro-Russia separatists and terrorists,” which made them eligible for massive human rights violations, including murder as foreign entities. 

Yet, with all of that, up until February 21, 2022, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of Black internationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, a route to a peaceful resolution to the crisis existed — the Minsk II agreement.  It was the Minsk II agreement, put in place after the independent republics fought the Ukrainian neo-fascists to a military stand-still, along with provisions for a ceasefire, that provided a path to peaceful resolution. The agreement would have provided political autonomy for the Donbas within the Ukrainian state, thus preserving the existing borders of Ukraine before the coup of 2014. 

Unfortunately, with the election of Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine, the Democrats immediately picked-up where U.S. policy left off in 2016 and started to encourage the Ukrainian government to ignore the Minsk II agreement and to consider taking back the Donbas by force. 

Today, after the U.S. flooded Ukraine with weapons, including long-range artillery that was introduced into the conflict area in violation of the Minsk ceasefire deal, the deployment of 150,000 Ukrainian troops positioned along the contact line between Ukraine and Donbas, and the shelling from the Ukrainian forces right during the period that the U.S. predicted that Russia would invade, the Minsk agreement has become another casualty of war. 

On February 18, 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he was “alarmed ” by a reported spike in Ukrainian artillery attacks against rebels in the eastern region of Donbas with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreement. Reports from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was tasked with the responsibility, since 2015, to monitor and report on violations of the agreement, indicated that in Donetsk, between February 18 and February 20, 2022, there were 591 ceasefire violations, and in Luhansk it recorded 975 ceasefire violations, including 860 explosions.  

What was the response from the Ukraine government? The government claims that OSCE is biased because the data it is gathering seems to indicate that it is the Ukrainian forces that are responsible for the increase in military actions.  

But that controversy and debate over that data failed to find itself in the daily coverage of the situation by the Western press, even though the empirical data clearly showed that Ukrainian forces were responsible for escalating the military engagement.  

Ukraine is just the symptom; the Disease is U.S. Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance”

The U.S. has its pretext to move the Europeans to impose economic sanctions against Russia, even though it is clear to many in Europe that the Biden administration’s policies are no more than the “liberal” version of “America First” as it relates to Europe. 

European capital, especially the Germans, are expected to take another hit for the team like it did during the first round of sanctions against Russia and the money they all lost with the Trump administration’s abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal). 

The capitalist oligarchy that is the base of Putin’s governing coalition may understand something that U.S. policymakers in their arrogance are underestimating, namely, that European capital is getting closer to a breaking point with the U.S., especially when money can be made in a context of relative stability in Europe as opposed to the destabilizing effects of conflict. 

They also know that the world is changing and that multipolarity is rapidly becoming the new reality and that European capital will have to make careful choices.

China is the number one trade and investment partner with the European Union states, the Chinese inspired “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) ” is the largest “free trade” agreement on the planet constituting one third of humanity and one third of global GDP. Russia is sitting on top of the Eurasia Economic Union that, in terms of land, is the largest trade union on the planet, and of course the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). 

The Russian recognition of the republics of Donbas was no more than the open acknowledgment of the dismembering of Ukraine. A process that started with the U.S. coup and the imposition of a government that completely turned over Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital. 

The lesson for the colonized, working classes and nationally oppressed? Authentic national liberation, people(s)-centered human rights, and self-determination for peoples and nations are impossible in a world in which capitalist competition and war are the defining characteristics of global relations. 

We must, as we say in the Black is Back Coalition and the Black Alliance for Peace, turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism! That is our task and responsibility. To do otherwise is to fail the historical mission of our generation. 

Orwell, Freud, and the Syrian Ruse

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Reality by other means

By Jason Hirthler

Source: Dissident Voice

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

— Karl Rove speaking to a small group of reporters at a cocktail party in 2004…… printed in the Washington Post

The adjective ‘Orwellian’ is so overused mostly because it is so incredibly apt on a daily basis. George Orwell’s basic concept reflects a simple tenet of propaganda: the thing you are hiding is often hid behind its exact opposite. Orwell expressed this concept in 1984 with the government slogans, “War is Peace,” “Ignorance is Strength,” and “Freedom is Slavery.” The Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud evidently suggested something similar about human nature: that to discover our true human nature, we need merely to reverse society’s moral maxims: if a commandment forbids adultery, it’s because we want to commit it. In other words, for both Orwell and Freud, we often disguise what we are doing behind claims that we are doing the opposite. We aren’t committing adultery; we’re practicing fidelity. We aren’t precipitating war; we’re pressing for peace. We aren’t seeking our own self-interest; we’re doing it all for others.

When applied to U.S. propaganda, the formula is revealing. To discover what your government is hiding, just reverse the media narrative. If the papers all say Russia is an imperial aggressor, it’s likely because Washington is. If the news networks say that Assad is a murderous monster, it’s likely because the groups we’re backing are. If the mainstream says Communism is a dire threat, it’s likely because capitalism is a dire threat. All of these examples are demonstrably true.

What confuses many readers is the fact that the first premise–that Russia, Assad, and Communism are all threats–usually has an element of truth to it, though not to the degree that it is portrayed. And so intelligent propaganda doesn’t simply traffic in lies, but rather half-truths, distortions, and omissions that themselves further distort a narrative. It is this sophisticated blend of fact, fiction, hyperbole and omission that makes propaganda so difficult to unpack for the average reader, who has little time, inclination, and practice in deciphering state-directed doctrine.

Reversing Reality

If Freud was correct, then we tend to publicly deny our greatest desires when they run counter to prevailing morality, shielding our base wishes behind a curtain of rectitude, even as we quietly pursue them. The modern instances of this in government are boundless. Example: FISA legitimates the surveillance it was designed to deter. Example: Congress abets the executive it was created to check. Example: ‘Defense’ becomes the aggression it was devised to defend against. Example: Healthcare becomes a bureaucracy built on denial of care in the name of its provision. Example. Journalism: the adversarial role of the fourth estate, becomes the adversary of the truth it was intended to protect. Journalists transcribe the diktats of power. Like the senators that notarize the mandates of the executive. Like the federal agents that entrap citizens in order to protect them. Like the drones that destroy lives to save them. Like the citizens who signal liberal values in support of imperial conquerors. Like the social justice warriors who legislate the intolerance they seek to eradicate. It seems to be a socio-political reality that the forcible assertion of one value guarantees a renaissance of its antitheses. Or is it that we forcibly assert a moral value to disguise a flowering of vice?

The process of turning a story into its opposite is fairly straightforward. If the U.S. is aggressively violating human rights, it needs to be rewritten as a defender of human rights. What this means in practice is switching the roles each of the actors assume in the narrative. Heroes become villains; villains become heroes; and victims are either genuine victims or villains depicted as martyrs for a righteous cause. This requires a good bit of romanticizing your side, demonizing the enemy, and eulogizing the victims. And then, as the author of Mein Kampf recommended, keep it simple. Your side wants one thing: peace. Your enemy wants one thing: war. And the victims want one thing: freedom.

Exhibit A

Take Syria as a recent example. The media narrative states that the U.S. and its freedom-loving allies have cautiously backed a loose confederation of rebels who rose up against Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad in 2011. In actuality, the U.S. and its freedom-hating allies have incautiously backed a loose confederation of foreign terrorists who have been paid to overthrow the elected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Only occasionally is the real backstory hinted at, which includes weakening Shia strongholds and destabilizing independent states in the region.

In turning the truth around to justify its war of aggression, the state and its supplicant media seized upon a handful of facts as the bedrock on which it constructed a false historical narrative. Which is what you’d expect from the Orwell-Freud model. And so…Are there elements of Syrian civil society that protested Assad in 2011? Absolutely. Are there actual Syrians fighting against Assad now? Sure. Are there elements of corruption and repression in Assad’s history? Definitely. But each of these truths are used to disguise the much larger facts of unmitigated U.S. aggression.

Upon this foundation, the typical narrative is constructed. The United States government is romanticized as a virtuous mediator concerned with supporting the freedom fighters and helping them achieve the freedoms they’ve yearned for. Assad is demonized as the autocratic mass murderer who repeatedly denies these freedoms, and tortures thousands before destroying the bodies. And the Syrian people, engine of the largest refugee crisis since World War Two, are shown as the valiant victims of the war, particularly in Aleppo, where the destruction of the city in an attempt to uproot the terrorist army is leveraged to milk as much emotional content from the war as possible and to further cement Assad’s reputation as a moral monster.

The MSM didn’t stop there. It followed with a series of attempts to further demonize Assad. A massive cache of photos purportedly detailing “regime” torture. This cache was delivered from somebody named “Caesar,” a defector not unlike the fake defector, “Curveball” from the run-up to the Iraq War. Twice false flags have been utilized to claim that the evil optometrist in Damascus has in a fit of pique demanded that innocent Syrians be sprayed with chemical weapons. Now a “crematorium” where Assad supposedly cremates all the Syrian citizens he is slaughtering (supposedly because he hates humanity so much). It doesn’t particularly matter if these stories eventually unravel when evidence is shown to be lacking. The damage is done to the psyche of readers and listeners, who absorb the media reports with the uncritical acceptance of animals entering an abattoir.

The takfiri mercenaries brought in by the West to topple Assad are likewise romanticized by the press. Instead of labeling the terrorists we backed as extremists, the New York Times peddled a story that they were moderates. Beheading of children, tossing gays from rooftops, using citizens as human shields, staging rescue operations, and many other atrocities failed to prevent the media from intransigently pushing this storyline.

No Quick Fix

As you can see, there is no shortage of opportunities to apply the Orwellian label to modern reportage. That said, I’m not suggesting that the authors at The New York Times and the Washington Post are all conniving propagandists consciously preparing deceitful reportage. For every Edward Bernays, there are a dozen Brian Williams. Often, they have simply internalized the values of the institution that employs them. They recognize, perhaps consciously or subconsciously, that their careers depend on their willingness to follow a particular narrative. And they make their choice, rationalizing themselves into a clean conscience.

Which is no surprise. The human species could give a master class in self-deception. And there are psychological needs that appear more urgent for us than truth. Namely, the need to feel good about oneself and believe in one’s tribe. Set aside the need to situate the world in a comprehensible narrative, the need to fit in with one’s peer group, and the need to do meaningful work and self-actualize in society. The point is that all of these needs are undermined by the counter-narratives of the left. Counter-narratives destabilize our cleanly delineated understanding of the world; they often ostracize us from our peer group; and they threaten our ability to contribute to society in a manner approved of by society (i.e., generally contributing to the machinery of consumerism). Who has time for a reconstruction of one’s worldview, especially if it might lead to social alienation? This is why just throwing facts at heavily propagandized people doesn’t often work. There are other forces in play, which may remind us that politics is often little more than a value signaling device for human beings.

So most of us, whatever inklings we may receive of an alternative reality, will settle for doing nothing untoward, recusing ourselves from political debates, and hewing as closely to inoffensive blandishments in our speech as we can. (The only other major path is to adopt the ideologically bankrupt cop-out of lesser evilism and rant about how horrible the other party is. This provides the frisson of feeling at one with the herd, but does nothing to improve society.) In other words, we shackle ourselves to political groupthink and play the role of the conscientious centrist like any good straight man would. We have no time for the revolutionary urgency of the disenfranchised. It was Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who argued that people don’t want intellectual freedom, but rather to be told what to believe. Only then will they be happy. Otherwise, we ruin our peace of mind through choice paralysis or some variety of existential angst, or through a lack of religious faith that leaves us with no guiding myth to sustain us. Given all these apolitical factors that inform whether or not one challenges the received narrative, is it any surprise that mental slavery and ignorance are as prevalent today as in Orwell’s time?

Libeled by the Washington Post in a ‘False News’ McCarthyite Attack on Alternative Media

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By Dave Lindorff

Source: This Can’t Be Happening

Is the Pentagon behind this massive hit on independent journalism?

ThisCantBeHappening.net didn’t make the Washington Post’s list of 200 news sites that are “purveyors of Russian propaganda” designed to “undermine Americans’ faith in democracy,” but an article by yours truly published on our site on September 29 which was picked up by Counterpunch.org and run the following day was cited as “proof” that Counterpunch is just such a perfidious agent of Russian subversion of the US — which I guess supposedly “outs” me as one of those secret Russian agents in the US alternative media.

The article in question, headlined US Propaganda Campaign to Demonize Russia in Full Gear over One-Sided Dutch/Aussie Report on Flight 17 Downing, called out the Dutch “investigation” into that horrific shoot-down of a fully-loaded Malaysian jumbo jet over war-torn eastern Ukraine in 2013, pointing out that the prosecutors and investigators involved refused to accept any radar or transmission monitoring evidence offered by Russia or by separatist rebels in the region, using instead only evidence provided by the Ukrainian intelligence service and government — this despite the fact that both Ukraine and Russia possessed quantities of the BUK missile and mobile launchers that were known to have been involved in the downing of the plane, and should thus both be potential suspects in the case. I also noted that as reported by noted former AP investigative reporter Robert Parry on his own Consortium News site (also on the Washington Post’s hit list of Russian propaganda sites), and by retired CIA Senior Analyst Ray McGovern, the Dutch investigators never asked for nor received any satellite surveillance photos or NSA transcripts of relevant telecommunications concerning the shoot-down from the US, though such evidence certainly exists.

The Washington Post article in question, written by Craig Timberg — surely either one of the most credulous and lazy journalists working in a major US news organization (and that’s really an accomplishment!), or a rank propagandist for the US government posing as a journalist at the Post — relied upon only two sources for his dramatic “exposé” purporting to prove that a massive Russian propaganda campaign had surreptitiously attempted to undermine (perhaps successfully!) the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and to throw the race to Donald Trump, at the same time undermining US foreign policy and faith in the US government while elevating the reputation of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both sources are falsely described by Timberg as being “two teams of independent researchers.” The assumption we clearly are meant to have is that these organizations have no institutional bias.

In fact, the first of these sources, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), turns out to be a hoary relic of the Cold War founded in 1955 by Robert Strausz-Hupé, an Austrian emigré and passionate anti-Communist. It has continued its anti-Russian propaganda stance since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2002 death of its founder and now boasts on its board of trustees jailbait like former Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane, a key player in the Reagan-era Iran Contra scandal who pleaded guilty to four counts of lying to Congress but was pardoned by President Reagan, arch-neocon and Russia-phobe Robert Kagan, a key promoter of the the US invasion or Iraq in 2003, and a whole host of other right-wing anti-Russian fanatics.

At least FRPI is willing to let people know who it is and who is running the joint. In contrast, the other of Timberg’s sources, PropOrNot, an organization with a website, PropOrNot.com, founded only several months ago, remains totally secret, providing no information on its site about its origins, its funding, its leadership or its staff. And yet Timberg confidently claims its information about Russia’s alleged epic propaganda effort was the result of the painstaking analytical work of these “experts.” In fact Timberg says the organization’s executive director, whom he quotes, asked for and received anonymity along with all his staff because they wanted to “avoid being targeted by Russia’s legions of skilled hackers.”

And the Post’s editors allow him to get away with this gutlessness and lack of transparency.

To get the full picture of how credulous and unprofessional — or willfully biased — Timberg’s editors at the Washington Post (often still considered one of the nation’s top “newspapers of record”), were in not vetting his article, read the Intercept’s article Washington Post Disgracefully Promotes a McCarthyite Blacklist from a New, Hidden and Very Shady Group, which devastatingly eviscerates both PropOrNot and the Post.

Suffice to say that besides allowing Timberg to use as the key source of his article and dramatic media blacklist an anonymous and clearly partisan group, PropOrNot, the Post’s editors also never required their supposedly crack “technology reporter” to even attempt to contact a single editor or journalist at any of the named alleged purveyors or “useful idiots” he was accusing of secretly spreading Russian-sourced “false news.” There’s not even a perfunctory: “Efforts to contact the editors at Counterpunch were unsuccessful” in the entire piece. Timberg and the editors of a paper that once gave us the Watergate story that brought down President Richard Nixon clearly didn’t even consider such basics of journalism important!

As we will see, there may be more than meets the eye to the hiding of PropOrNot’s secret personnel list, though. Bear with me.

I can vouchpersonally for Timberg’s lack of journalistic principle and reportorial effort.Counterpunch is listed on PropOrNot’s home page as number nine on the PropOrNot.org blacklist, under the headline: “Russian Propaganda Targets All Americans.” PropOrNot conveniently included two links to Counterpunch articles which it indicates make its case for including the site on their list. The first, under the heading “Review Article,” takes the reader to a page of Propornot.com and an article headlined: “Russia Useful Idiots Proliferate Russian Propaganda.” Below that snarky headline, the PropOrNet analyst Joel Harding gives an analysis of the article, in which he questions the author’s qualifications to be a self-described part of the American left, since he identifies himself as a socialist, which Harding then tells the reader “isn’t exactly the normal American ‘left’, but the ‘remnants of the Soviet’ left.” Comically, Harding fails to notice that actually the Counterpunch author in this case isn’t even a US resident, but describes himself as a “retired aerospace worker living in British Columbia.”

Clearly this is not a website given to sober expert analysis as characterized by the Post’s Timberg.

In any event, the reprint that follows Harding’s introduction, written by the Canadian Counterpunch contributor Robert Annis, and headlined “Western Media Propaganda Threatens Peace and Prolongs the Deadly Conflict in Eastern Ukraine,” which ran Sept. 2, reports quite factually, quoting such Western sources as Reuters and the New York Times, that a plurality of Swedes and Finns oppose their respective conservative governments’ efforts to join NATO. Annis then goes on to quite accurately write that US reporting on the civil war in eastern Ukraine fails to note that it is Ukrainian forces that are taking aggressive actions towards the separatist regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, not separatists (or Russians) invading the or threatening regions of Ukraine to the east of those two breakaway ethnic-Russian majority provinces.

Nothing in Annis’s article sources Russian information, and there is no evidence that Annis, who clearly identifies himself in his accompanying Counterpunch bio, as a Canadian socialist and as editor of the website The New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond.

Think about it a moment. If that kind of open identification of the politics of its authors is how Counterpunch operates (and it is), it’s pretty hard to see how anyone, except for the incredibly credulous or disingenuous Timberg and his pathetic sources for his scare story could perceive the magazine as being a secret vehicle for promoting subversive Russian propaganda!

The second link in PropOrNot’s Counterpunch listing is under the heading “Absurd Pro-Russia Content.” This link leads directly to my article! Apparently in the view of the “experts” at PropOrNot, my piece is such blatant propaganda that no introduction and analysis by someone as skilled at detecting hidden bias and Russian perfidy as Harding is even required. I’m guessing it’s my lead, which refers ironically enough to the Pentagon’s own all-too real propaganda campaign aimed at Americans designed to convince them that Russia is an aggressive and existential threat to the United States.

And in fact, while our corporate media don’t talk about it, the US does run a vast propaganda operation, which includes the spawning and spreading of, guess what?, fake news stories! This kind of thing has gone on for years abroad, but since 2001, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, both the Pentagon and the US Information Agency have done away with an earlier ban on spreading such lies posing as news inside the US. Now we’re all fair game for US propaganda, which by the way the mainstream media routinely parrot. (Of course, we were already massively fed false stories by our mainstream media, from WMDs in Hussein’s Iraq to Assad’s chlorine gas attacks in Damascus, from only “moderate” Jihadi rebels being armed and trained in Syria to US hospital bombings like the one in Kunduz, Afghanistan being “accidents,” not deliberate targeting.)

In any event, no effort is made by either PropOrNot or Timberg to show how my article, which is based upon my own opinions and analysis, my own reporting, plus the excellent work of crack investigative journalists like Bob Parry, and experts like Ray McGovern, is either a piece of Russian propaganda, or a parroting of other articles that might be, in Timberg’s view, Russian propaganda.

I wrote an email to Timberg offering to explain to him how as a veteran, award-winning journalist and investigative reporter of 44 year’s experience with four critically reviewed books to my name and five years’ experience as a foreign correspondent for Business Week in Hong Kong and China, I select my stories to report on and to write, so that he might get the proverbial “other side” of his story out to readers. So far, Timberg hasn’t replied to that offer. I’m sure editors at some of the sites expressly named on Timberg’s PropOrNot list — none of whom he apparently bothered to try and contact while cobbling together his article — have done the same.

What it appears we really have here courtesy of Timberg and the Washington Post is a classic piece of McCarthyite red-baiting propaganda, complete with a call for the FBI and US Justice Department to investigate those on the list for possible violation of the US Espionage Act, the Foreign Agent Registration Act “and other related laws.” Any site that is critical of US foreign policy, who says anything favorable about Russia, or who was critical of Hillary Clinton, is suspected of being a Russian propagandist.

Where things get really serious is that if this Harding character — the guy whose byline appears in the introduction on PropOrNot’s first page of evidence against Counterpunch magazine — is what he appears to be, PropOrNot could actually be a Pentagon funded operation, which would make Timberg’s Washington Post hit piece on alternative news sites particularly outrageous, and his and the Post editors’ keeping of the site’s members and owners names secret a scandal of enormous proportions. Harding, I have discovered through some research on Google, while perhaps not a high-wattage secret propagandist spotter, does appear to be a major figure in PropOrNot — perhaps even its mysterious executive director? He describes himself on his own website as having this interesting background: 35 years “working national security issues,” including enlisted soldier in a Special Forces detachment, followed by a career as a military intel officer, at information operations at the Department of Defense, and organizer of InfowarCon, which hosts meetings on cyberwarfare.

And while some might take some pause at the source, Russia Insider, which describes itself as a media criticism site put out by a “group of expats living in Russia,” the site reports that Joel Harding, a current or retired brigadier general in the US Army and a self-described NATO advisor, heads a “team of dedicated internet trolls,” allegedly on the Pentagon payroll, who “openly libel and harass” journalists and authors whom the ever-vigilent Harding perceives to be Kremlin agents. No wonder PropOrNot wants its members’ identities kept secret!

If any of this stuff is correct, it means that this whole effort to tar the country’s leading alternative news sites and leading independent journalists on left and right as Russian agents workinF aspart of a propaganda conspiracy is really just a gigantic “fake news” story perpetrated by the government, and worse perhaps, the military — with the willing connivance of one of the country’s leading newspapers — an idea that should turn the stomach and infuriate any real American.

And remember, this is happening not because of the election of Donald Trump — the guy the Russians supposedly manipulated gullible American voters into putting into the White House. Rather, pretty evidently, it’s happening because some leading Democratic Party hacks, and the very clearly pro-Hillary Clinton Washington Post, are trying to divert the blame for Clinton’s stunning loss to Trump not on the Democratic Party’s and Clinton’s epic failure to connect with the working class voters they both long since abandoned, but on the alternative media that helped expose not just Clinton’s and the Democratic Establishment’s corruption, but the ugly reality of US militarism and foreign policy that both Clinton and the Democratic Party so enthusiastically back.

And while I’m certainly no purveyor of or “useful idiot” transmitter of “Russian propaganda,” I do plead guilty to being part of that alternative media, which is in the best traditions of American journalism going back to Tom Paine and John Peter Zenger.