Propaganda

Drowning In CIA Propaganda Then And Now

July 28, 2017 Edward Curtin, www.counterpunch.org Educate! CIA, Propaganda

By Edward Curtin for Counter Punch - Have you ever seen a photograph of yourself from the past and laughed or grimaced at the way you were dressed or your hair style? It’s a common experience. But few people draw the obvious conclusion about the present: that our present appearance might be equally laughable. The personal past seems to be “over there,” an object to be understood and dissected for its meaning, while the present seems opaque and shape-shifting – or just taken-for-granted okay. “That was then,” says the internal voice, “but I am wiser now.” Historical perspective, even about something as superficial as appearance, rarely illuminates the present, perhaps because it makes us feel ignorant and unfree. This is even truer with political and social history. In recent years there has been a spate of books and articles detailing the CIA’s past Cold War cultural and political propaganda efforts, from the creation of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) with its string of magazines, to its collaboration with many famous writers and intellectuals, including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Richard Wright, Irving Kristol, et al., and its penetration and working relationships with so many publications and media outlets, including The New York Times, the Paris Review, Encounter, etc.

The Propaganda Campaign To Drive US War Against Iran

July 26, 2017 Ben Norton, www.fair.org Educate! Iran, Propaganda, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

By Ben Norton for FAIR - A new Vox video (7/17/17) is the latest addition to a media onslaught that propagates numerous misleading talking points to demonize Iran—just as the US government, under Donald Trump’s vehemently anti-Iran administration, is ratcheting up aggression against that country. The 10-minute film, titled “The Middle East’s Cold War, Explained,” is a textbook example of how US government propaganda pervades corporate media. With the help of a former senior government official and CIA analyst, the Vox video articulates a commonplace pro-US, anti-Iran narrative that portrays the violent conflicts in the Middle East as sectarian proxy wars between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In order to do so, the film grossly downplays US involvement in the region, treating Saudi Arabia as though it acts independently of the US. It also fails to ever mention Israel, totally removing one of the most important players in the Middle East from its “Cold War” narrative. Vox multimedia producer Sam Ellis likewise constructs a false equivalence for Iran, depicting it as a kind of Shia Saudi Arabia that is just as guilty of spreading sectarianism. The video correspondingly exaggerates Iran’s international influence, which is assumed to be dastardly and malign.

Newsletter: When Empires Fall

July 23, 2017 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter BDS, Climate Change, Empire, Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Korea, Mass Surveillance, NAFTA, Net Neutrality, Propaganda, Trade, Wars and Militarism

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. The Pentagon recently released a report, "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World," which details its concerns about losing access to resources and "resistance to authority" both at home and around the world as governments lose legitimacy. Faced with these changes, the United States could embrace them, become a cooperative member of the world, transition to a lower-waste lower-energy sustainable existence and draw back the military to use those resources to meet domestic needs. Sadly, that is not what the Pentagon has in mind. There is a saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The US is the biggest empire in the world; therefore, the Pentagon's solutions are "more surveillance, more propaganda ('strategic manipulation of perceptions') and more military expansionism." The United States' reign as an Empire is coming to an end. It is up to those of us living in the US to take action to prevent more aggression and demand that the US dismantle its empire in a way that causes the least harm at home and abroad.

Emails Show Iraq War PR Alums Led Attempt To Discredit Dakota Access Protesters

July 22, 2017 Steve Horn, www.desmogblog.com Educate! Dakota Access Pipeline, Propaganda

By Steve Horn for Desmog - Behind the scenes, as law enforcement officials tried to stem protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, alumni from the George W. Bush White House were leading a crisis communications effort to discredit pipeline protesters. Emails show that the firms Delve and Off the Record Strategies, apparently working on contract with the National Sheriffs’ Association, worked in secret on talking points, media outreach, and communications training for law enforcement dealing with Dakota Access opponents mobilized at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. This revelation comes from documents obtained via an open records request from the Laramie County Sheriff's Department in Wyoming. As previously reported by DeSmog, the GOP-connected firm DCI Group led the forward-facing public relations efforts for Dakota Access via a front group called Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN). Today MAIN has morphed into a national effort known as Grow America’s Infrastructure Now (GAIN). Delve is an opposition research firm run by Jeff Berkowitz, former Republican National Committee research director and official in the George W. Bush White House. His company led research efforts on behalf of the National Sheriffs' Association.

Venezuela Votes: Will The World’s Media Ever Get It Right?

July 18, 2017 Staff, www.telesurtv.net Educate! Elections, Media, Propaganda, Venezuela, Voting

By Staff of Tele Sur - International coverage entirely ignores Sunday's demonstration of support for a Constituent Assembly. Did you hear the one about a practice election in Venezuela, where millions of people lined up from early morning until late at night, just to cast their vote in a dry run poll that meant absolutely nothing at all? Except to express support for another election in two weeks time? Actually, it's not a joke. It did happen. On Sunday. Video shows them singing and dancing as they waited to test voting machines and see how the election of a new Constituent Assembly on July 30 will work. But you probably never heard about it. Because the world's media, pretty much without exception, concentrated almost exclusively on the other vote happening in Venezuela on Sunday, an informal plebiscite held by the opposition, with no constitutional status, to oppose that Constituent Assembly. So let's just look at the quality media. The New York Times for example — you remember: “All the news that's fit to print.” Well, maybe not ALL of it ...

New Lies Exposed In Russiagate

July 17, 2017 Staff, www.moonofalabama.org Educate! Donald Trump, Propaganda, Russia

By Staff of Moon of Alabama - The President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin is dully elected and not a dictator. The Russian Federation may not be a "liberal democracy", but it is a democracy. The picture is old. It shows all Russian journalists who died during their work since 1991. Most of them died as war- or crime-correspondents and were not involved in politics at all. The death of most of those journalists is not mysterious. Getting blown up by artillery during the wars in Chechnya, Yugoslavia or Ukraine is no mystery at all. Most of these journalists never criticize Putin. They were already dead before Putin had any significant political role. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) lists 82 killed Russian journalists since 1992, most of them died due to war or related to civil crimes or corruption. There are about 80 portraits of journalists in the picture Mounk tweeted. Two recognizable portraits and names therein are of Vlad Listyev, a TV entertainment producer killed in 1995 over some controversy about lucrative advertisement on public TV. Another portrait is of Dmitry Kholodov, killed in 1994 while investigating mafia connections within the Russian military. At the time of their death Putin was a minor bureaucrat in Saint Petersburg. He did not gain power until he became acting president at the end of 1999. According to the CPJ numbers more Russian journalists were killed during the eight years of Yeltsin's presidency (1992-2000) than in the 17 years of Putin's presidencies since.

Yemen: The War That Isn’t Happening Even As It’s Happening

July 17, 2017 Luciana Bohne, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Propaganda, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism, Yemen

By Luciana Bohne for Counter Punch - Saudi Arabia, backed by the US and Britain, began bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the region, on 23 March 2015—without a Security Council resolution, as has been the tradition for launching western wars since Bill Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War (the bombing of Serbia). The stated objective of the Anglo-American backing of the Saudi attack was the restoration of Yemen’s US-supported government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi’s, which fled to Saudi Arabia under the mounting pressure of the Houthi Shia rebels, accused by the United States of being pawns of Iran, or, dismissively, plain Iran-supported. Boggles the mind to think of the blithe moral logic that justifies the support of the United States for a (largely faked) uprising in Syria when Iran is not allowed to assist Houthis in Yemen, fighting an authentic civil war, unlike the so-called Free Syrian Army and their hordes of 80% foreign al-Qaeda and Isis allied invaders of Syria’s sovereign state in 2011. The hypocrisy of empire, one supposes: supporting rebels in one case and the legitimate government in another. For this reason—Iran’s backing—the Saudis blockade the air and the ports of Yemen to check the flow of Iranian arms shipments to the rebels, adding to the infamy of the war the infamy of an economic siege—infamy because the largest number of victims in this tactic to encircle Iran are civilians, which is another tradition respected by the sorry, deceptive War on Terror.

Variations In Media Reports On Mass Arrests Of Protesters

July 16, 2017 Adam Johnson, www.fair.org Educate! Media, Propaganda, Russia, Trump

By Adam Johnson for FAIR. Major media’s relative lack of interest in the mass arrests by Metro DC police on Inauguration Day is a fact noted by activists and journalists since the incident almost six months ago. One way to measure the dearth of coverage is to compare the attention paid to comparable protester arrests in Russia last month. On June 12, over 1,700 Russians throughout the country were arrested for “unauthorized protests” in opposition to President Vladimir Putin and government corruption. “Dozens”—including opposition leader Alexei Navalny—were kept in jail longer than a day, but the vast majority were let go immediately. (Navalny, as well as some others, got between 15–30 days in jail.) More than 200 Americans were arrested on January 20 after “rioting” broke out in downtown Washington, DC, in the hours leading up to and after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Misinforming The Majority: A Deliberate Strategy Of Right-Wing Libertarians

July 10, 2017 Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org Educate! Libertarianism, Propaganda, Right-Wing

By Mark Karlin for Truthout - Many individuals who follow politics and journalists think that the right-wing playbook began with the Koch brothers. However, in her groundbreaking book, Nancy MacLean traces their political strategy to a Southern economist who created the foundation for today's libertarian oligarchy in the 1950s. Mark Karlin: Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States? Nancy MacLean: The modern extreme right wing I'm talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President Eisenhower called them "stupid" and fashioned his approach -- calling it modern Republicanism -- as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda. He didn't. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state.

Media’s Propaganda War On Syria

July 2, 2017 Jonathan Cook, www.jonathan-cook.net Educate! Chemical Weapons, Media, Propaganda, Syria

By Jonathan Cook for Jonathan Cook Blog. If you wish to understand the degree to which a supposedly free western media are constructing a world of half-truths and deceptions to manipulate their audiences, keeping us uninformed and docile, then there could hardly be a better case study than their treatment of Pulitzer prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. All of these highly competitive, for-profit, scoop-seeking media outlets separately took identical decisions: first to reject Hersh’s latest investigative report, and then to studiously ignore it once it was published in Germany last Sunday. They have continued to maintain an absolute radio silence on his revelations, even as over the past few days they have given a great deal of attention to two stories on the very issue Hersh’s investigation addresses.

Russia-gate Is No Watergate Or Iran-Contra

June 30, 2017 Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com Educate! Propaganda, Russia

By Robert Parry for Consortium News - Although the historical record is still incomplete on Watergate and Iran-Contra, the available evidence indicates that both scandals originated in schemes by Republicans to draw foreign leaders into plots to undermine sitting Democratic presidents and thus pave the way for the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. As for Russia-gate, even if you accept that the Russian government hacked into Democratic emails and publicized them via WikiLeaks, there is still no evidence that Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Kremlin to do so. By contrast, in the origins of Watergate and Iran-Contra, it appears the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, respectively, were the instigators of schemes to enlist foreign governments in blocking a Vietnam peace deal in 1968 and negotiations to free 52 American hostages in Iran in 1980. Though Watergate is associated directly with the 1972 campaign – when Nixon’s team of burglars was caught inside the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building – Nixon’s formation of that team, known as the Plumbers, was driven by his fear that he could be exposed for sabotaging President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to secure the White House that year.

This Is What Democratic Party Propaganda Looks Like

June 28, 2017 Sheila Norton, www.washingtonjournal.com Educate! Democratic Party, Electoral Politics, Propaganda, Ruling Class

By Sheila Norton for The Washington Journal - It began with two Democratic legislators, both deeply concerned about the threat from the Republicans’ Trumpcare bill, sitting on the steps of the Capitol — Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Representative John Lewis (D-GA), the Civil Rights legend himself. What began as a conversation shared on Facebook grew organically into a powerful moment of truth. Ben Winkler of MoveOn.org happened to be walking by in the early moments and chronicled the evening as the crowd and emotion swelled. I’ll let Ben’s words speak for themselves, but this should serve as a reminder that despite everything there are genuinely good people working passionately to make Americans’ lives better, and magic can happen when a concerned citizenry gets involved. After your read and share this thread, call your Senators at 202.224.3121 and let them know exactly how you feel about the effort to repeal Obamacare.

New Cracks In Russia-gate ‘Assessment’

June 23, 2017 Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com Educate! Propaganda, Russia

By Robert Parry for Consortium News - At the center of the Russia-gate scandal is a curious U.S. intelligence “assessment” that was pulled together in less than a month and excluded many of the agencies that would normally weigh in on such an important topic as whether Russia tried to influence the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. The Jan. 6 report and its allegation that Russia “hacked” Democratic emails and publicized them through WikiLeaks have been treated as gospel by the mainstream U.S. media and many politicians of both parties, but two senior Obama administration intelligence officials have provided new information that raises fresh doubts about the findings. On Tuesday, former CIA Director John Brennan told the House Intelligence Committee that only four of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies took part in the assessment, relying on analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the oversight of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brennan said the report “followed the general model of how you want to do something like this with some notable exceptions. It only involved the FBI, NSA and CIA as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Break Through The Propaganda: Oliver Stone Interviews Putin

June 20, 2017 Alexander Mercouris, www.theduran.com Educate! Foreign Relations, Propaganda, Russia, Vladimir Putin

By Alexander Mercouris for The Duran - I have now watched the first three episodes of the Putin Interviews, which is sufficient to give an overview of the series. In my opinion it is by far the best and most interesting series of programmes which have appeared on Western television about Vladimir Putin. I would say that claims that Oliver Stone fails to raise ‘difficult subjects’ with Putin are simply untrue. All the usual stories about Putin – his KGB past, his reputed homophobia, his ‘billions’, his ‘murders’, his ‘aggressions against Georgia and Ukraine’ etc – are all there. There is also one telling moment when Stone and Putin strongly disagree with each other. This is in relation to a recent Russian law that requires Russian internet providers to store data for longer than previously, and to hand it over to the Russian security services if requested following a court order. The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has denounced this law as a ‘big brother’ law. Stone clearly agrees with him and tells Putin as much. Putin predictably enough doesn’t agree. The key difference between Stone and other Western interviewers is that Stone doesn’t try to get the better of Putin by bullying and hectoring him.

Controversy Surrounds Mueller RussiaGate Investigation

June 13, 2017 Staff, www.irrussianality.wordpress.com Educate! Donald Trump, James Comey, Propaganda, Robert Mueller, Russia, RussiaGate

By Staff of Irrussianality - Good thing I checked. Reading the New York Times this morning I almost coughed out my breakfast cereal on the sight of the following full page ad on page 7: What was the ‘therussiansarehere.org’, I wondered. The front for a bunch of well-financed maniacs determined to further exacerbate East-West tensions? As it happens, no. It turns out to be an advertisement for the TV show ‘The Americans’, about a pair of Soviet agents working undercover in 1980s America. My initial fears that The New York Times had finally gone from merely paranoid to full-blown crazy proved exaggerated. But, only slightly. The newspaper’s front page contained the headline ‘Trump’s standoff with Comey overshadows Russian threat’, a choice of words seemingly designed to create the impression that the ‘Russian threat’ is an incontestable fact. The article continues on page 26, with a half-page spread complaining that the fuss about James Comey is diverting attention from the real danger coming from Russia. It cites retired diplomat Daniel Fried as saying, ‘we’re facing an adversary who wishes for his own reasons to do us harm. … Comey was spot-on right that the Russia is coming after us, but not just the US, but the free world in general.’

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