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Propaganda

Western Media Whitewash Yemen Genocide

With the United Nations warning that millions of civilians could die from violence or starvation from the ongoing military siege of the Yemeni port city of Hodeida, there is no other way to describe what is happening except as “genocide”. The more than three-year war on Yemen waged by a Western-backed Saudi coalition has been arguably genocidal from the outset, with up to eight million people facing imminent starvation due to the years-long blockade on the Arabian country, as well as from indiscriminate air strikes. But the latest offensive on the Red Sea city of Hodeida threatens to turn the world’s already worst humanitarian disaster into a mass extermination. Hodeida is the entry point for 90 per cent of all food and medical aid into Yemen. If the city’s port stops functioning from the military offensive – as UN aid agencies are warning – then an entire country population of more than 20 million will, as a result, be on the brink of death.

The NED’s Useful Idiots

On Friday, June 8, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow augmented her nightly Russiagate fetish by extolling the merits of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), telling her huge audience that the NED, created in the 1980s by the Ronald Reagan administration, still does the “non-partisan hard work around the world, of promoting small D democracy and promoting the institutions of civil society that any culture needs in order to have a functioning democracy.” By Wednesday, June 13, at least one progressive writer, Bill Berkowitz, had challenged Maddow’s viewpoint on NED as “naive”. He wrote: “Whatever else can be said about the NED and its affiliated organizations, it is hard to back up Maddow’s naive claim about its work re ‘promoting small D democracy.’

Does The Burns/Novick Vietnam Documentary Deserve An Emmy?

By the time I reached Episode Four in this ten-episode film, I concluded it should not be touted as an Emmy Award-winning documentary. In my eyes, documentation is rooted in facts and, if at all possible, immutable truths. ...We are watching instead a series of anecdotes, each one imbued with the earnestness of the teller. Episode Four, “Resolve,” is the story of 1966, a year that the producers of this film have designated as the time when doubt began to worm its way into American troops. This doubt sows the breeding ground for what we now call “moral injury.” The American soldier in Vietnam begins to realize that his job of killing others, or supporting those who are carrying out the killing, is not divinely ordained. He is not in a just war. In fact, he is being used by others who have much more pedestrian motives—rank, saving face, gaining political favor, selling weapons.

Are You Brainwashed?

Does it take a dictatorial regime—Nazi or Communist—to turn the media into a brainwashing machine? Common sense says that this is impossible in a democracy. Common sense is wrong. How is this done? It’s quite simple, really: one has to suppress all other voices. One has to make sure that the citizen hears only one voice. One that repeats a few messages over and over, endlessly. This way the lie becomes truth. In such a situation, the ordinary citizen becomes convinced that the official line is really their own personal opinion. This is an unconscious process. When one tells a citizen that they are brainwashed, they are deeply insulted.

How The Corporate Media Enslave Us To A World Of Illusions

For several years now, I have been writing regular posts on my blog with one end in mind: to help open a door for readers and encourage them to step through. I select issues, usually those that dominate western media coverage and represent a consensus that we might term the Great Western Narrative, and try to show how this narrative has been constructed not to inform and enlighten but to conceal and deceive. It is not that I and the many other bloggers doing this are cleverer than everyone else. We have simply had a chance – an earlier one – to step through that door ourselves, because of a jarring life experience that the Great Western Narrative could not explain, or because someone held the door open for us, or more usually because of a combination of the two.

Open Letter to Amnesty International by a Former Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience

Nicaragua’s close ties with Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and especially China, with whom the country signed a contract to build a canal, the other main reason the United States is after the Sandinistas, is Nicaragua’s highly successful economic model, which represents an existential threat to the neoliberal economic order imposed by the U.S. and its allies. Despite always being among the poorest nations in the American continent and the world, Nicaragua has managed, since Ortega returned to power in 2007, to cut poverty by three quarters. Prior to the protests in April, the country’s economy sustained a steady annual economic growth of about 5% for several years, and the country had the third fastest-growing economy in Latin America, and was one of the safest nations in the region. The government’s infrastructural upgrades have facilitated trade among Nicaragua’s poorest citizens; they have created universal access to education: primary, secondary, and university; there are programs on land, housing, nutrition, and more; the healthcare system, while modest, is not only excellent but accessible to everyone.

New York Times And Israel Smear Slain Palestinian Medic

The New York Times today printed a long article giving credence to Israeli claims that Razzan al-Najjar, the young medic killed by an Israeli sniper a week ago, was not innocent. The article takes at face value Israel’s desperate efforts to taint the young woman, whom the army has previously maintained it killed by accident. The first paragraph announces the Times’s service to Israel: "The Israeli military published a brief video on Thursday aimed at showing that a Palestinian medic killed by Israeli forces last week was not the neutral health care worker she has been portrayed as." The article parrots Israeli hasbara, or propaganda, about al-Najjar: that in a video interview of the medic that the Israelis passed along she described herself as a “human shield.”

The Propaganda And Economic Attacks On Venezuela Continue After Election

When I read the Foreign Policy article referenced in the first paragraph I was amazed at the how many false myths could be contained in one article. Then I saw the author was José R. Cárdenas who was the acting assistant administrator for Latin America at the notorious regime change agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development in the George W. Bush administration. He's also worked for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and the Organization of American States, which the US uses as a cover to control Latin America. So, he is well-steeped in anti-Venezuela regime change propaganda. Cardenas was working on Latin American issues during the US-backed 2002 US-backed coup of Hugo Chavez. I was very pleased to see Roger's article because Cárdenas and his propaganda needed to be pointed out.

The New York Times And The Murder That Wasn’t

On Tuesday, the right-wing Ukrainian regime reported that Arkady Babchenko, a Russian journalist living in Kiev and a vocal critic of the Kremlin, had been shot dead in his apartment building. Kiev immediately pointed the finger at Moscow, with Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Hroysman declaring that “the Russian totalitarian machine” was responsible for the journalist’s murder. Within minutes, the news flashed across the globe, becoming a lead story in major news outlets in Europe and the United States, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the BBC. The Mighty Wurlitzer of American propaganda began belching vast amounts of hot air. In every report, the announcement of the murder was accompanied with the conclusion that the Russian government was behind it: that is, the US media outlets announced a murder mystery and its solution simultaneously.

Russiagate: Spooks Spooking Themselves

As the role of a well-connected group of British and U.S. intelligence agents begins to emerge, new suspicions are growing about what hand they may have had in weaving the Russia-gate story, as Daniel Lazare explains. With the news that a Cambridge academic-cum-spy named Stefan Halper infiltrated the Trump campaign, the role of the intelligence agencies in shaping the great Russiagate saga is at last coming into focus. It’s looking more and more massive.  The intelligence agencies initiated reports that Donald Trump was colluding with Russia, they nurtured them and helped them grow, and then they spread the word to the press and key government officials.  Reportedly, they even tried to use these reports to force Trump to step down prior to his inauguration.

Propaganda Killing Kills Propaganda – First The Skripals, Now Arkady Babchenko Come Back From The Dead

But the case was murky. Babchenko was critical of all Russians who did not protest against the Russian involvement in Syria and Ukraine. When the TU 154 with the Red Army Choir crashed and 92 artists died, Babchenko said that it did not bother him. In his eyes those too were guilty people. That did not make him any friends. When he moved to the Ukraine he was just as cynical towards the people and the Ukrainian government. He raised harsh accusations against the Ukrainian President Poroshenko. Many common people hated him, many issued threats. After his murder was announced and everyone had had time to "blame Russia", contradicting tales of how the murder happened emerged.

The Real Venezuela Is Not What You Think

I just returned from observing my fourth election in Venezuela in less than a year. Jimmy Carter has called Venezuela’s electoral system “the best in the world,” and what I witnessed was an inspiring process that guarantees one person, one vote, and includes multiple auditing procedures to ensure a free and fair election. I then came home to the United States to see the inevitable “news” coverage referring to Venezuela as a “dictatorship” and as a country in need of saving. This coverage not only ignores the reality of Venezuela, it ignores the fact that the U.S. is the greatest impediment to democracy in Venezuela, just as the U.S. has been an impediment to democracy throughout Latin America since the end of the 19th century.

Media Delegitimize Venezuelan Elections Amid Complete Unanimity Of Outlook

However, Western media have taken an entirely different outlook to the proceedings, unanimously presenting them as seriously flawed, at best, and at worst a complete sham presided over by a dictator. The New York Times (5/20/18) presented the election as “a contest that critics said was heavily rigged in his favor,” Huffington Post (5/21/18) christened it “a vote denounced as a farce cementing autocracy in the crisis-stricken OPEC nation,” while NPR (5/21/18) stated: Nicholas [sic] Maduro has easily won a second term, but his main rivals have refused to accept the results, calling the polling fraudulent—a view shared by the United States and many independent observers.

U.S. Media Whitewashes Gaza Massacre

As Israel killed more than 50 Palestinians in cold blood protesting the American embassy move on Monday, U.S. corporate media failed to accurately report what happened in Gaza, once again meekly protecting the government line. Typical of the mindset of corporate media reporting on what happened in Gaza on Monday as Israeli soldiers killed more than 50 protesting Palestinians, is this tweet from CNN. It says: “Death toll rises to at least 52 people during clashes along the border fence between Israel and Gaza, Palestinian officials say. More than 2,400 people have been injured.” CNN’s new slogan is “#FactsFirst.”

CNN’s Iran Fearmongering Would Make More Sense Coming Directly From Pentagon

Why doesn’t CNN Defense Department reporter Barbara Starr just leave CNN and instead work directly for the Trump DoD? On Tuesday, hours after President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), Starr (5/8/18) rushed to publish an anonymously sourced and transparently propagandistic press release for the Trump administration and Pentagon. Wouldn’t it be easier if Starr just skipped the middleman and just worked for the DoD? In her 513-word piece, “US Officials Growing Increasingly Concerned Iran Could Attack Israel,” Starr mindlessly repeated “concerns” by unnamed US Department of Defense and Israeli Defense Force officials that Iran might directly attack Israel and/or Israeli positions in occupied Syria—something that has never happened in recorded history: There are increasing concerns Iran is on the cusp of an attack against Israel, several US military officials told CNN.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

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Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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