The so-called journalists in Canada are trembling because they believe Poilievre will defund them. I hope he does. If you cannot survive without government subsidies you should not exist at all. They received close to a billion dollars last year from the Trudeau gov. No wonder they are supporting him. Fake support if you ask me. The so-called legacy media in Canada is a joke, a propaganda outlet for the Libs. Lou
Globalโs parent company Corus Entertainment tapped into Canada,s Wage Subsidy program.
From the Brits:
These types are not journalists and are denigrating the integrity of real journalists, the very few that remain in North America. How can these types sit there and spew what they know is propaganda garbage from their masters? Paycheques, that’s all. It’s all mind control based on fear and doom if you do not submit to the elites’ plan. Lou
Why is it so hard to find our authenticity in this world? This is one explanation. What is your theory?
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called โforever warsโ โย Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pilger-silencing-lambs-how-propaganda-works
BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, SEP 11, 2022
Authored by John Pilger via ConsortiumNews.com,
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirationalย samizdat already exists on the internet:ย Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthalโs ย The Grayzone,ย Mint Press News, Media Lens,ย DeclassifiedUK, Alborada,ย Electronic Intifada,ย WSWS,ย ZNet,ย ICH,ย CounterPunch,ย Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.ย
In the 1970s, I met one of Hitlerโs leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the โpatriotic messagesโ of her films were dependent not on โorders from aboveโ but on what she called the โsubmissive voidโ of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. โYes, especially them,โ she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
Of course, we are very different from Germany in the 1930s. We live in information societies. We are globalists. We have never been more aware, more in touch, and better connected.ย
Leni Riefenstahl, center, filming with two assistants, 1936. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Or do we in the West live in a Media Society where brainwashing is insidious and relentless, and perception is filtered according to the needs and lies of state and corporate power?
The United States dominates the Western worldโs media. All but one of the top 10 media companies are based in North America. The internet and social media โ Google, Twitter, Facebook โ are mostly American-owned and controlled.
In my lifetime, the United States has overthrown or attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, mostly democracies. It has interfered in democratic elections in 30 countries. It has dropped bombs on the people of 30 countries, most of them poor and defenseless. It has attempted to murder the leaders of 50 countries.ย ย It has fought to suppress liberation movements in 20 countries.ย
The extent and scale of this carnage is largely unreported, unrecognised, and those responsible continue to dominate Anglo-American political life.
In the years before he died in 2008, the playwright Harold Pinter made two extraordinary speeches, which broke the silence.
โU.S. foreign policy,โ he said, is
โbest defined as follows: kiss my arse or Iโll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that itโs so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.โ
In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, Pinter said this:
โThe crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. Itโs a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.โ
Pinter was a friend of mine and possibly the last great political sage โ that is, before dissenting politics were gentrified. I asked him if the โhypnosisโ he referred to was the โsubmissive voidโ described by Leni Riefenstahl.
โItโs the same,โ he replied. โIt means the brainwashing is so thorough we are programmed to swallow a pack of lies. If we donโt recognise propaganda, we may accept it as normal and believe it. Thatโs the submissive void.โ
Leni Riefenstahl and a camera crew stand in front of Hitlerโs car during 1934 rally in Nuremberg. (Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
In our systems of corporate democracy, war is an economic necessity, the perfect marriage of public subsidy and private profit: socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. The day after 9/11 the stock prices of the war industry soared. More bloodshed was coming, which is great for business.
Today, the most profitable wars have their own brand. They are called โforever warsโ โย Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and now Ukraine. All are based on a pack of lies.
Iraq is the most infamous, with its weapons of mass destruction that didnโt exist. NATOโs destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi that didnโt happen. Afghanistan was a convenient revenge war for 9/11, which had nothing to do with the people of Afghanistan.
Today, the news from Afghanistan is how evil the Taliban are โnot that U.S. President Joe Bidenโs theft of $7 billion of the countryโs bank reserves is causing widespread suffering. Recently, National Public Radio in Washington devoted two hours to Afghanistan โ and 30 seconds to its starving people.
At its summit in Madrid in June, NATO, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes โmulti domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor.โ In other words, nuclear war.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, left, and Spainโs Prime Minster Pedro Sรกnchez on June 28 in Madrid. (NATO)
It says: โNATOโs enlargement has been a historic success.โย
I read that in disbelief.
The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.
In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.
In 2014, the United States sponsored a coup inย Kievย that got rid of Ukraineโs democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.ย
Dec. 7, 2015: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden meets with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in Kiev. (U.S. Embassy Kyiv, Flickr)
In recent years, American โdefenderโ missiles have been installed in eastern Europe, Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, almost certainly aimed at Russia, accompanied by false assurances all the way back to James Bakerโs โpromiseโ to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 that NATO would never expand beyond Germany.
Ukraine is the frontline. NATO has effectively reached the very borderland through which Hitlerโs army stormed in 1941, leaving more than 23 million dead in the Soviet Union.
Last December, Russia proposed a far-reaching security plan for Europe. This was dismissed, derided or suppressed in the Western media. Who read its step-by-step proposals? On Feb. 24, President Volodymyr Zelensky threatened to develop nuclear weapons unless America armed and protected Ukraine.
On the same day, Russia invaded โ an unprovoked act of congenital infamy, according to the Western media. The history, the lies, the peace proposals, the solemn agreements on Donbass at Minsk counted for nothing.
On April 25, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into Kiev and confirmed that Americaโs aim was to destroy the Russian Federation โ the word he used was โweaken.โ America had got the war it wanted, waged by an American bankrolled and armed proxy and expendable pawn.
Almost none of this was explained to Western audiences.
Russiaโs invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no โbutsโ โ except one.
When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regimeโs civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.
Watch an ITV news report from May 2014, by the veteran reporter James Mates, who is shelled, along with civilians in the city of Mariupol, by Ukraineโs Azov (neo-Nazi) battalion.
In the same month, dozens of Russian-speaking people were burned alive or suffocated in a trade union building in Odessa besieged by fascist thugs, the followers of the Nazi collaborator and anti-Semitic fanatic Stepan Bandera. The New York Times called the thugs โnationalists.โ
โThe historic mission of our nation in this critical moment,โ said Andreiy Biletsky, founder of the Azov Battalion, โis to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival, a crusade against the Semite-ledย Untermenschen.โ
Since February, a campaign of self-appointed โnews monitorsโ (mostly funded by the Americans and British with links to governments) have sought to maintain the absurdity that Ukraineโs neo-Nazis donโt exist.
Airbrushing, once associated with Stalinโs purges, has become a tool of mainstream journalism.
In less than a decade, a โgoodโ China has been airbrushed and a โbadโ China has replaced it: from the worldโs workshop to a budding new Satan.
Much of this propaganda originates in the U.S., and is transmitted through proxies and โthink-tanks,โ such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by journalists such as Peter Hartcher of The Sydney Morning Herald, who has labeled those spreading Chinese influence as โrats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrowsโ and suggested these โpestsโ be โeradicated.โ
Andriy Beletsky, commanding officer of the special Ukrainian neo-Nazi police regiment Azov, with volunteers in 2014. (My News24, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases thatย surroundย most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are like loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a โnoose.โ
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the โconflictโ of โtwo narratives.โ The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisers working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission is not new. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were given knighthoods for their compliance. In 1917, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to Prime Minister Lloyd George: โIf people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they donโt know and canโt know.โ
The refusal to see people and events as those in other countries see them is a media virus in the West, as debilitating as Covid. It is as if we see the world through a one-way mirror, in which โweโ are moral and benign and โtheyโ are not. It is a profoundly imperial view.
The history that is a living presence in China and Russia is rarely explained and rarely understood. Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler. Xi Jinping is Fu Man Chu. Epic achievements, such as the eradication of abject poverty in China, are barely known. How perverse and squalid this is.
When will we allow ourselves to understand? Training journalists factory style is not the answer. Neither is the wondrous digital tool, which is a means, not an end, like the one-finger typewriter and the linotype machine.
In recent years, some of the best journalists have been eased out of the mainstream. โDefenestratedโ is the word used. The spaces once open to mavericks, to journalists who went against the grain, truth-tellers, have closed.
Julian Assange in 2014. (David G Silvers, Wikimedia Commons)
The case of Julian Assange is the most shocking.ย ย When Julian andย WikiLeaksย could win readers and prizes forย Theย Guardian,ย Theย New York Times,ย and other self-important โpapers of record,โ he was celebrated.ย
When the dark state objected and demanded the destruction of hard drives and the assassination of Julianโs character, he was made a public enemy. Vice President Joe Biden compared him to a โhi-tech terrorist.โ Hillary Clinton asked, โCanโt we just drone this guy?โ
The ensuing campaign of abuse and vilification against Julian Assange โ the U.N. rapporteur on torture called it โmobbingโ โ brought the liberal press to its lowest ebb. We know who they are. I think of them as collaborators: as Vichy journalists.
When will real journalists stand up? An inspirationalย samizdat already exists on the internet:ย Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthalโs ย The Grayzone,ย Mint Press News, Media Lens,ย DeclassifiedUK, Alborada,ย Electronic Intifada,ย WSWS,ย ZNet,ย ICH,ย CounterPunch,ย Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.ย
And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will filmmakers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?ย
Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isnโt it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.
* * *
John Pilger has twice won Britainโs highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News Reporter of the Year and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA and the Royal Television Society prize. His โCambodia Year Zeroโ is named as one of the ten most important films of the 20th century. He can be contacted at www.johnpilger.com
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of ZeroHedge or Consortium News.
I am certain because this all started with a scientific fraud relating to a virus, augmented it with a relentless campaign of fear, imposed measures known to be useless, which wrecked the economy and smashed civil society, then coerced most to accept useless, unnecessary, ineffective and deliberately dangerous injections. Obviously, this is an odious crime. Nothing like it has ever happened.
Global Research, September 02, 2022
Exposing the Darkness 1 September 2022
Theme: Science and Medicine
***
Dear everyone, who is nervously looking around and is asking โWhat the hell is going on?โ
I hope this isnโt too controversial. Itโs certainly frightening, but I believe we are still on the right side of disaster & if enough of us become aware of what is happening here & everywhere in the democratic world, we can recover the situation. We really donโt have long. I believe itโs likely things will change irretrievably over this coming winter. Hence this urgent and unusual request.
Everything thatโs happened and is happening becomes much simpler and it all makes sense, only when you force yourself to think the impossible.
If you experimentally adopt the position that OUR GOVERNMENT IS ACTIVELY WORKING TO HARM US, TO DISMANTLE MODERN SOCIETY & ENSLAVE ALL PEOPLE IN A DIGITALLY CONTROLLED TOTALITARIAN WORLD, it all fits. Nothing is surplus.
Even if your immediate response is that this is absurd, please try it for a day or so.
I ask you further to adopt the experimental position that the media, controlled by just six global corporations, all allied to a single global organization youโve all heard of, is relentlessly lying to you and has been doing so for over 2.5 years. Same for the internet, controlled by fewer global corporations, also all allied to that same global organization.
Because I am certain itโs true. I am certain because this all started with a scientific fraud relating to a virus, augmented it with a relentless campaign of fear, imposed measures known to be useless, which wrecked the economy and smashed civil society, then coerced most to accept useless, unnecessary, ineffective and deliberately dangerous injections. Obviously, this is an odious crime. Nothing like it has ever happened.
Iโve been 41 years in life sciences from training to successful biotech CEO and was worldwide research head and Vice President of Pfizerโs respiratory unit (1995-2011).
I have absolutely no incentive to say any of this if I wasnโt certain.
I am certain. This all took place โin my wheelhouseโ, my domain of expertise.
Please consider what Iโve said.
โโIโve given over 70 interviews, all censored. Iโve been foully smeared. Itโs propaganda. It tells you what theyโre capable of.
Hereโs what Pfizerโs former board member wrote about my accomplishments: Turning Pfizer Discards Into Novartis Gold: The Story Of Ziarco
Do I sound like a fool?
Many have asked why people didnโt resist tyrants in the past. Partly it is fear. But itโs more than that. Itโs that normal people, like you and me, simply cannot imagine being so evil. We trust in humanity. And so we should. Most people are good. Few are truly terrifyingly horrible. But some are. Itโs the inability to believe itโs happening that really stopped people objecting when they should, when the evidence was unmistakable but had not yet quite reached their door, their family.
They are coming for you and your children. It is happening again. Thereโs ample evidence emerging of long-term, patient planning. Iโm so sorry.
Itโs now up to you. I genuinely donโt see what else I can do.
Best wishes & sincere thanks,
Sept 1, 2022
This morning I went to a favorite cafรฉ and bakery to get some sourdough and sip on a decaf on the front porch.
A group of retired age folks sat down next to me. Two older couples.
Of course, it’s impossible for me NOT to listen in on a conversation when I’m all alone and the people next to me are speaking very loudly, but their conversation was one I hear over and over again when I hang out in public.
They were breaking down the present Trump situation, and you would have thought you were in the company of the actual prosecutor or DA.
They knew ALL the details!
They spoke with TREMENDOUS authority!
They knew PRECISELY what Trump was up to!
They NAMED NAMES!
They were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN of guilt!
In reality they don’t know a damn thing about any of this, as they have no direct or insider experience.
They’re just repeating stuff they heard on TV, which is how they spend their free time. Watching TV, then taking that garbage to their tribe and pridefully demonstrating their ability to speculate and regurgitate with confidence.
I personally don’t care about Trump, and the content here doesn’t matter, as I’ve heard the same conversation a hundred times at this cafรฉ.
The only thing that changes is the current thing.
If you want to enslave and abuse a population, control the content of their minds. Get them thinking in narratives, and train them how to skip from narrative to narrative on a dime.
When there isn’t an original brain cell left in their head it’s go time.
Tax the snot out of them. Waste their money. Punish those who dissent. Destroy their labor with inflation. Starve them, or worse.
I used to read a lot of history books, and this story is always the same.
But the true heroes of history are the ones who can withstand brainwashing and use their lives as an expression of that golden gift of human individuality.
Don’t allow your mind be colonized. Be original. Think for yourself. Seek out your own truth.
https://www.newstarget.com/2022-08-31-corporate-media-attacking-vitamin-d-natural-remedies.html
08/31/2022
Fake news giant Forbes has published a propaganda piece declaring vitamin D to be โworthlessโ and even โdangerousโ for humans.
Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and the articleโs author, argues that people need to โStop Taking Vitamin D Already!โ โ this being the title of his piece.
Salzberg is so against vitamin D that he added it to his top five list of vitamins that people should never take, making it a top six list of โuseless vitamin supplements,โ as he calls them (the other five are vitamin C; vitamin A and beta carotene; vitamin E; vitamin B6 (pyridoxine); and multivitamins).
Even though upwards of 75 percent of the American population is deficient in vitamin D, Salzberg argues that people should avoid it like the plague because a paper published in The Lancet supposedly found that it โdid not help to prevent heart disease, weight gain, mood disorders, multiple sclerosis, and metabolic disorders, all of which had been linked to lower vitamin D.โ
Since vitamin D has gained a lot of traction due to the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) โ check out the evidence showing that vitamin D works against infectious diseases โ Salzberg and others like him are trying to nip it in the bud and scare people away from taking it.
โThe only prophylactics the corporate media ever apparently want to promote are masks and vaccines โ tools of social control and biomedical profiteering, respectively,โ writes Ben Bartee for The Daily Bell.
โJohns Hopkins is the undisputed Heart of COVID-19 Darkness โ the progenitor of lockdown policies and the most-cited authority for the corporate media and government to justify mask and vaccine mandates.โ
While it may be true that vitamin D supplements are not the most optimal form of intake โ natural sunlight, without sunscreen, is your best option โ Salzberg is of the persuasion that the vitamin is useless and even harmful, which is laughable.
Johns Hopkins, it turns out, is Big Pharma central. The school touts the โbenefitsโ of nanobot โtheragrippersโ that latch onto the intestines like parasites in order to deliver pharmaceuticals to the bloodstream, all while denigrating natural vitamins.
It is no surprise, in other words, that Salzberg is writing hit pieces against natural vitamins on behalf of Johns Hopkins, which is an enemy of natural remedies and health freedom, which donโt make Big Pharma any money.
What Salzberg conveniently failed to address in his hit piece is the fact that vitamin D deficiency is linked to a host of health problems, not the least of which include chronic fatigue, muscle twitching, confusion, nausea, weakness, constipation, paresthesia and poor appetite.
A lack of vitamin D also makes a person more prone to developing an infectious disease, as well as multiple sclerosis, autoimmune rheumatic diseases (ARD), cancer, osteoporosis, arthralgia, myalgia and type 1 diabetes.
โBut thatโs all golden for Big Pharma,โ Bartee further writes. โTheyโve got vaccines for acute infections and drugs to hook you on for life to treat chronic illnesses.โ
โTheyโll drain you of your life savings as you slowly die, all the while never getting to the root cause of your illness โ which, in many cases, might well be a vitamin D deficiency. Cured patients donโt pad Pfizerโs bottom line.โ
In the year 2022, it is simply astounding that any media outlet, no matter how corrupted, would be so foolish as to publish anti-vitamin D propaganda. The cat is long out of the bag, and Forbes, Salzberg and Johns Hopkins are unsuccessfully trying to stuff it back in.
The latest news about natural remedies for optimal health can be found at Cures.news.
Sources for this article include:
The American newspaper disregarded the testimonies of volunteers to support its consistently anti-Russian stance
https://www.rt.com/russia/555609-western-media-ignores-donbass-refugees/
Byย Stepan Kostetskiy
May 19, 2022
A view of temporary accommodation center where evacuees, including residents from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, take shelter at a former sports hall in Taganrog in the Rostov region, Russia. ยฉ Fedor Larin / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Last week, the Washington Post published an extensive article titled โUkrainian refugees in Russia report interrogations, detention and other abusesโ.
Bias against Russia is nothing new for the newspaper, owned by the oligarch Jeff Bezos. However, this particular story โ authored by its former Moscow bureau chief Michael Birnbaum and reporter Mary Ilyushina (known as Maria when she worked in Russian domestic media) โ appears to have gone even further than its usual output.
One of the people quoted in the piece is Danil Makhnitsky from โSociety. Future.โ, a political organization that coordinates volunteers who help refugees. When the article was published, Makhnitsky found out that most of what he had said didnโt make the cut, and the only quote the newspaper used was taken out of context. RT spoke with Danil about his work with refugees and the interview he gave the newspaper.
โSociety. Future.โ insists it’s an independent political organization. Danil is its co-founder, and he represented New People in the State Duma election, while other members of the community ran as independents. Since the conflict started, the organization has been helping refugees, collecting donations and bringing supplies to refugee centers around Russia. According to communityโs website, 70 volunteers have helped about 8,000 refugees and spent over 6.8 million rubles on humanitarian aid.
โWe work all over southern Russia, in 13 regions, focusing on the cities that have been affected by the flow of refugees the most,โ Makhnitsky told RT. โThe government provides large shipments of basic necessities, and we supply other things, like clothes, personal hygiene items, and medicine. This is funded through donations from people who want to help.โ
A shot from the temporary accommodation center in Taganrog.
โAnother difference between what we do and the government does is that we meet specific needs. First, we collect the data โ ask what exactly is needed in each refugee center, and then we buy these things for them. Weโve gotten very specific requests โ like glasses with an exact prescription. We also buy some things in bulk, like bed linens, for example. As an NGO, weโve had some difficulties along the way. Itโs not that easy for an individual to buy 100kg of noodles, 500 T-shirts, or 1,000 sets of bed linens,โ Makhnitsky said.
Makhnitsky has worked with temporary refugee facilities in Taganrog, Azov, and other Russian cities. When the Washington Post journalists contacted him, he was in Rostov-on-Don. He said he had suspected his story would be skewed, but everything seemed pretty decent.
โMy conversation with Birnbaum [The Washington Post author covering military conflicts who wrote the article โ RT] was in English and lasted an hour or an hour and a half. At the time, I thought Birnbaum was quite reasonable โ he asked sensible questions, showed a good grasp of the facts, didnโt even look as if he fully trusted the official Ukrainian propagandaโs narrative, which was the only thing the article ultimately reflected. My impression was that he was really trying to understand, to get to the bottom of things,โ Makhnitsky said. However, something happened between the conversation and publication. He hopes the author was forced to distort the story due to editorial policy; he doesnโt want to believe that Birnbaum had another motive.
โHe asked me if we had seen refugees being forcibly held somewhere or their passports taken away. And I said it like it is โ we have talked to thousands of people, and none of them told us anything like that or tried to ask for help or pass a note.โ
โVolunteers and refugees develop relationships based on trust. When you bring aid to people, they donโt see you as part of the administration or the authorities. Sometimes they complained about the administrationโs actions or about their living conditions. Some of them resented their situation โ the very fact that they had to leave because of the fighting. But none of the thousands of people gave us any hint that they were taken away or were being held by force, or that their documents had been taken away.โ
โOffer of benefits from the Khabarovsk Territoryโ and the handwritten message โConsultation on resettlement to the Khabarovsk Territory in the next roomโ
According to Makhnitsky, refugees often shared their plans with the volunteers. Many said they wanted to continue living in Russia or someplace abroad, while the majority said theyโd prefer to return home. When talking to Makhnitsky, Birnbaum mentioned a couple of cases in which people had their passports taken from them.
Makhnitsky recalls: โWell, thatโs what I said in response, that possibly, given the huge number of refugees, it could have happened. But I spoke to a huge number of all sorts of people, including volunteers and coordinators, and the feedback I got indicates that nothing like this was going on en masse. In those few cases when it happened, we donโt know why exactly it was done, for what reason. Sometimes, combatants try to present themselves as refugees, which is wrong, they cannot pose as refugees, they must be processed as POWs, so such things are inevitable.โ
Makhnitsky says that nothing he said was published in Birnbaumโs piece in the Washington Post, except this one sentence: โSome of the refugees donโt understand where they are going when they sign up.โ Makhnitsky insists that these words of his were ripped out of the context and placed into a narrative that changes their meaning completely.
โI was talking about a refugee center in Taganrog that receives refugees from Mariupol before they can go elsewhere in Russia. People spend one or two days at most in this place to get their papers. They donโt stay there for a long time.”
โIn this center, there were some promotional posters by the Ministry for the Development of the Russian Far East. They invite people to come to Khabarovsk [a large city near the Chinese border] and offer some incentives, like some money, better loan rates, and even a possibility to get a hectare of land. And some of the people who saw these posters talked to me about this opportunity while it was clear they didnโt even know where Khabarovsk was. No one was forcing them to go there, and yet when ripped out of the context my words sound like thatโs the case, like people donโt even know where they will go. This is just a lie.โ
Makhnitsky also said that the choice of contributors to the piece by Birnbaum and Ilyushina was quite telling. โThe reporters chose to talk to people who donโt even deal with this directly, such as, for instance, the U.S. ambassador to the OSCE. How would he know whatโs going on there? Iโm sure he never even met any refugees in Russia. Other opinions were also provided by the officials from the United States or Kiev. I think the only person the Washington Post talked to who could have seen some refugees was Laila Rogozina, head of the reception office at the Civic Assistance Committee. Yet what she is quoted to have said appears quite controversial, that all refugees allegedly donโt trust volunteer staff and are afraid to criticize Russia when they talk to us. Iโm sure thatโs not the case.โ
RT has reached out to Birnbaum for comment, offering him a platform to answer Makhnitskyโs allegations. If he eventually replies, this story will be updated.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. Journalism that does not conform must be taken down.
By Pepe Escobar
Special to Consortium News
This month, several of us โ Scott Ritter, myself, ASB Military News, among others โ were canceled from Twitter. The โ unstated โ reason: we were debunking the officially approved narrative of the Russia/NATO/Ukraine war.
As with all things Big Tech, that was predictable. I lasted only seven months on Twitter. And that was long enough. Contacts in California had told me I was on their radar because the account grew too fast, and had enormous reach, especially after the start of Operation Z.
I celebrated the cancelation by experiencing an aesthetic illumination in front of the Aegean Sea, at the home of Herodotus, the Father of History. Additionally, it was heart-warming to be recognized by the great George Galloway in his moving tribute to targets of the new McCarthyism.
In parallel, comic relief of the โMars Attacksโ variety was provided by expectations of free speech on Twitter being saved by the benign intervention of Elon Musk.
Techno-feudalism is one of the overarching themes of my latest book, Raging Twenties โ published in early 2021 and reviewed here in a very thoughtful and meticulous manner.
Cancel culture is inbuilt in the techno-feudalist project: conform to the hegemonic narrative, or else. In my own case regarding Twitter and Facebook โ two of the guardians of the internet, alongside Google โ I knew a day of reckoning was inevitable, because like other countless users I had previously been dispatched to those notorious โjailsโ.
On one Facebook occasion, I sent a sharp message highlighting that I was a columnist/analyst for an established Hong Kong-based media company. Some human, not an algorithm, must have read it, because the account was restored in less than 24 hours.
But then the account was simply disabled โ with no warning. I requested the proverbial โreviewโ. The response was a demand for proof of ID. Less than 24 hours later, came the verdict: โYour account has been disabledโ because it had not followed those notoriously hazy โcommunity standards.โ The decision was โreviewedโ and โit canโt be reversedโ.
I celebrated with a Buddhist mini-requiem on Instagram.
My hit-by-a-Hellfire missile Facebook page clearly identified for the general public who I was, at the time: โGeopolitical analyst at Asia Timesโ. The fact of the matter is Facebook algorithms canceled a top columnist from Asia Times โ with a proven record and a global profile. The algos would never have had the โ digital โ guts to do the same with a top columnist from The New York Times or the Financial Times.
Asia Times lawyers in Hong Kong sent a letter to Facebook management. Predictably, there was no response.
Of course becoming a target of cancel culture โ twice โ does not even remotely compare to the fate of Julian Assange, imprisoned for over three years in Belmarsh under the most appalling circumstances, and about to be dispatched for โjudgmentโ in the American gulag for the crime of committing journalism. Yet the same โlogicโ applies: journalism that does not conform to the hegemonic narrative must be taken down.
Conform, or Else
At the time, I discussed the matter with several Western analysts. As one of them succinctly put it, โYou were ridiculing the U.S. president while pointing out the positives of Russia, China and Iran. Thatโs a deadly combinationโ.
Others were simply stunned: โI wonder why you were restricted as you work for a reputable publication.โ Or made the obvious connections: โFacebook is a censorship machine. I did not know that they do not give reasons for what they do but then they are part of the Deep State.โ
A banking source that usually places my columns on the desks of selected Masters of the Universe put it New York-style: โYou severely p****d the Atlantic Councilโ. No question: the specimen who oversaw the canceling of my account was a former Atlantic Council hack.
Ron Unz in California had the account of his extremely popular website Unz Review purged by Facebook on April 2020. Subsequently, readers who tried to post their articles met with an โerrorโ message describing the content as โabusiveโ.
When Unz mentioned my case to renowned economist James Galbraith, โhe really was quite shocked, and thought it might signal a very negative censorship trend on the Internet.โ
The โcensorship trendโ is a fact โ for quite a while now. Take this U.S. State Department 2020 report identifying โpillars of Russiaโs disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.โ
State Dept. Directive
The late Pompeo-era report demonizes โfringe or conspiracy-mindedโ websites who happen to be extremely critical of U.S. foreign policy. They include Moscow-based Strategic Culture Foundation โ where Iโm a columnist โ and Canada-based Global Research, which republishes most of my columns (but so does Consortium News, ZeroHedge and many other U.S. websites). Iโm cited in the report by name, along with quite a few top columnists.
The reportโs โresearchโ states that Strategic Culture โ which is blocked by Facebook and Twitter โ is directed by the SVR, Russian foreign intel. This is ridiculous. I met the previous editors in Moscow โ young, energetic, with enquiring minds. They had to quit their jobs because after the report they started to be severely threatened online.
So the directive comes straight from the State Department โ and that has not changed under Biden-Harris: any analysis of U.S. foreign policy that deviates from the norm is a โconspiracy theoryโ โ a terminology that was invented and perfected by the C.I.A.
Couple it with the partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council โ which is a de facto NATO think tank โ and now we have a real powerful ecosystem.
Itโs a Wonderful Life
Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)โs LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to โbuild a database tracking a personโs entire existence.โ Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day โ Feb. 4, 2004 โ that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.
No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MITโs David Karger, at the time, remarked, โI am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I canโt imagine DARPA โdropping outโ of such a key research area.โ
Of course a smokinโ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLogโs conceptualizer: โFacebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (โฆ) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.โ
So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalistโs work, or assuming itโs entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an โecosystemโ built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.
The resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter โ incapable of recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking โ is perfectly integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).
In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating โthe collapse of journalism and democracy.โ
Facebook โfact-checking professional journalistsโ does not even qualify as pathetic. Otherwise Facebook โ and not analysts like McGovern โ would have debunked Russiagate. It would not routinely cancel Palestinian journalists and analysts. It would not disable the account of University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi โ who was actually born in the U.S.
I received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook โ and now by Twitter โ is a badge of honor. Well, everything is impermanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Daoism). So being deleted โ twice โ by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.
Pepe Escobarโs latest book is Raging Twenties. He remains un-cancelled on VK, Telegram and Instagram.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/media-number-one-cause-war-1898
THURSDAY, MAR 31, 2022 – 03:30 AM
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
In 1895, a 32-year old entrepreneur in New York City bought a failing newspaper and hatched a bold plan to turn it around.
The newspaper industry was cutthroat, especially in New York. There were at least 16 other daily newspapers in circulation, and there was fierce competition for readersโ attention.
But the young entrepreneur had an idea: thrill readers with tales of death, destruction, and brutality in the Cuban War for Independence against Spain.
Cuba was a Spanish colony at the time, but revolutionary forces had been fighting for independence for several years. Few people in the US really cared about Cuba. But the new publisher vowed to make them care.
His name was William Randolph Hearst. And his paper, the New York Morning Journal, constantly thrust Cuba in his readersโ faces.
Their stories were full-blown sensationalism. By early 1898, Hearstโs Journal was printing outright fabrications of atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, in an effort to whip up public support for the United States to join the war.
The government played along. While โwar crimesโ did not yet exist, US President William McKinley escalated tensions by accusing Spain of atrocities, saying in a speech that โthe civilized code of warfare has been disregarded.โ
Then, on February 15, 1898, a US naval vessel known as the Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor off the coast of Cuba. 268 sailors died.
Several investigations were conducted, and to this day there is still nothing conclusive explaining how the explosion took place. Itโs entirely possible that the explosion was caused by the Maineโs on-board fuel.
But Hearst (along with many other papers) jumped to publish stories claiming the Maine was sunk by a Spanish torpedo, and they continued agitating for the US to join the war.
Thanks to the effective media propaganda, most Americans were in favor of war. The newspapers had cast Spain as the evil aggressor, and its commanding general, Valeriano Weyler, was routinely called a โbutcherโ.
The newspapers told Americans that the fight against Spain was a necessary oneโฆ that it was a matter of moral righteousnessโ a crusade of good against evil.
They finally got their wish in April 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out.
There are a lot of similarities with the media today.
The level of trust in the media is already laughably low. There was the obvious Hunter Biden laptop coverup, which most mainstream media refused to even mention during the US Presidential election in 2020.
Then there were the outright lies in the Russia collusion hoax, for which the New York Times was even awarded the โesteemedโ Pulitzer Prize.
(Coincidentally, the Pulitzer is named after Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who also fabricated lies in the late 1800s and agitated for war against Spain.)
Then thereโs the case of Biden appointee Tracy Stone-Manning, who was nominated last year to head up the federal governmentโs Bureau of Land Management.
Stone-Manning is a former eco-terrorist who participated in violent campaigns against forestry workers in her youth.
This isnโt some wild conspiracy theory; Stone-Manning has admitted to wrongdoing, including sending violent threats to the US federal Forestry Service. She ultimately avoided prosecution and saved herself by ratting out her associates.
But a recent Freedom of Information Act request revealed that NBC News colluded with the Biden Administration to go easy on Tracy Stone-Manning during her confirmation hearing and whitewash her terrorist history.
This is pretty incredibleโฆ
Think about the media circus a few years ago when US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexually assaulting someone when he was a teenager.
There was no promise from NBC News (and other mainstream propagandists) to go easy on the allegations against Justice Kavanaugh that went back 30+ years.
Instead, they smeared his name and deemed him guilty.
Itโs also noteworthy that, during Kavanaughโs confirmation hearing, several protestors stormed the Capital and physically accosted United States Senators in order to prevent the Constitutional voting process from occurring.
Yet NBC News declined to label those protestors โdomestic terroristsโ, or to claim that democracy was โunder attackโ because they had criminally trespassed into the Capitol.
This is the same media which acted as the government mouthpiece during COVID, justifying the public health dictatorship that took over the world.
This is the same media that watched cities burn in 2020 and said the protests were โmostly peacefulโ.
And, yes, this is the same media that has routinely pushed America into war. It wasnโt just Spain in 1898.
The United States joined the Vietnam War based on a Gulf of Tonkin skirmish with the North Vietnamese which never actually occurred. But the Johnson administration and intelligence sources said it happened, so the media reported it as fact.
Then there were those supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, which the media dutifully reported without question and helped push the US into war back in 2003.
Today many in the media are calling for an escalation against Russia. They want a no-fly zone. They cheer the Presidentโs dementia-ridden foreign policy and praise him for impromptu comments that only escalate tensions.
Most of all, they force-feed the war in Ukraine, 24/7, as if thatโs supposed to be our #1 priority.
Forget about the economy, rising prices, and supply chain dysfunctionโฆ and forget about conflict anywhere else in the world. Weโre only allowed to care about Ukraine and Putin.
Historically speaking, it is not far-fetched to think the media could help push the world into a major warโฆ and one with potential nuclear ramifications.
Itโs not inevitable, but we are closer today than any other time since at least 1962โ and certainly closer than even a week ago.
Thatโs why it is more important than ever to be prepared for whatever the world has in store for us.
And that means crafting a rock-solid Plan B to make sure you can respond from a position of strength, whatever crisis comes next.
The majority of Canadians want to defund the CBC. It has become the Liberal Party’s mouthpiece. Enough.
Tales from the Conspiratum 
