Category Archives: Propaganda / Misinformation

Putin Accused of Orchestrating High-Stakes Assassination Behind BRICS Summit

Putin’s Western critics are seizing the opportunity presented by the recent plane crash, in which Prigozhin was listed among the passengers. They are attributing the downing of the plane to Putin without presenting any concrete evidence.

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EXPOSED: DISTURBING DETAILS OF NEW PENTAGON “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT OFFICE”

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, has exposed how the Pentagon very quietly launched a new internal division, dubbed the “Influence and Perception Management Office” (IPMO), in March.

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America’s Balloon Obsession is an Attempt to Prevent Detente with China

For the last several days, the mainstream propaganda machine diverted its attention from the mandatory “evil Russia” narrative and focused on 24/7 coverage of a weather balloon. Although the media frenzy was part of the “evil China” narrative, this one is not as omnipresent as that about Russia, at least not yet.

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Why is AP Still Protecting the Source Behind its False Russia-Bombed-Poland Story?

AP’s source claimed Russian missiles hit Poland. This seemed calculated to set off a frenzy and trigger NATO articles to create a wider war. Why won’t the AP tell us who the falsifying source is?

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EXPOSED: Covert Pro-Western Info Op

Declassified Australia’s Peter Cronau flags and analyzes a report by researchers at Stanford University and Graphika about a massive secret propaganda operation being run out of the U.S.  The report, from late August, has been buried by the Western media.

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Western Psychological Warfare Apparatus Creates False Beliefs

An increasingly large number of people now agree that information of all kinds in the countries of North America, Europe and their Pacific allies is deployed overwhelmingly to serve the interests of Western corporate oligarchs and the politicians who front for them.

Outlets including news media and NGOs, academic and scientific journals as well as international institutions have practically all been fully integrated now into the long standing, global psychological warfare offensive of the West’s ruling classes.

At home, they work relentlessly to control the perceptions and behavior of their countries’ populations. Overseas, they seek constantly to mobilize international opinion against countries like Russia and China, governments from Syria to Venezuela, political movements like Hezbollah, and even individuals, like Julian Assange, who resist them.

The main purpose of this vast psychological warfare apparatus is to create false beliefs which over time harden into false memories. The process consolidates ruling class control domestically while also facilitating their present and future crimes of aggression around the world.

Populations in the West are deliberately misinformed and misled by means of plausible misrepresentation, blatant distortion, systematic omission and downright lies. Categories of information such as journalism, academic and scientific research, investigation by NGOs or briefings from international institutions have all been deformed, distorted and devalued by their abuse so as to further the domestic and global interests of the Western oligarchies.

Since long before 20th Century public relations and psychology, the fundamental way to manipulate mass consciousness, from the Holy Inquisition to the enthronement of Science, has been to encourage submission to authority. The Milgram experiment is a notorious example, although, in one respect, itself a cause for optimism. Other more insidious means sow ruling class messaging among otherwise trusted contrary sources.

Concentrated corporate control of information and communications resources has made possible mutual constant universal reinforcement between all varieties of mass media and information outlets. Like magicians, governments and corporations understand very well that suppressing resistance depends on disappearing contrary information by every means possible, including censorship, mass distraction and sensory overload.

An apparently hardly noticed corollary of this systematic perversion of good faith reporting, research and investigation has been a collapse of rationality. In Western public life, it is now effectively forbidden to compare and contrast rival versions of events which contradict the general received wisdom propagated by Western government and corporate approved information outlets.

So political and intellectual argument in North America and Europe has become ever more narcissistic, self-serving and ultimately irrational. This applies also to supposedly progressive or even radical outlets which in their coverage of international affairs still depart from essentially neocolonial assumptions of Western superiority.

Over the last fifteen years or so a growing number of independent writers and reporters have sought to challenge the false information spread by well coordinated and concentrated corporate and government controlled networks of mutually reinforcing information outlets. This development has notably sharpened the relation between information and class.

More clearly than ever the production and distribution of information has become a vast theater of propaganda operations controlled by a multinational intellectual managerial class with shared imperatives. They promote and enforce a class monopoly of access to information outlets for producers of information and similarly a corresponding monopoly of distribution outlets, both mainstream and ostensibly alternative, for its consumption.

All production and distribution of information involves some variety of reporting which, like any other human activity, can be good or bad. Reporting in general has always been an arena of competing interests and rationalities. But, even so, fundamental components of competent reporting have generally been held to include, among other things, recording first hand accounts of events, clearly sourcing those accounts, presenting trustworthy data and documentary evidence, offering provenance of those sources, acknowledging loyalties and bias while considering competing rival versions, making the reporting accessible and frankly submitting all this material to free and open scrutiny.

It is certainly debatable when contemporary reporting began its categorical collapse into the current gross, unrelenting pyschological warfare offensive by North American and European oligarchies against their own peoples and the majority world. However, the rapidly increasing numbers of independent reporting outlets signal the reality of that collapse and also help reveal its class nature, its class nuances and its irrationality.

The currently developing fierce efforts by the West’s ruling oligarchs to repress and censor independent reporting confirm the wholesale abandonment of rationality by Western societies and their leaders. A principal criterion for appraising rationality in an individual or a society is precisely their ability and self-confidence in making a case against rival arguments.

Attempts at outright censorship, or the many other kinds of arbitrary intellectual and cultural repression deployed, represent a failure to be able to reason effectively, to promote consensus or to accommodate legitimate dissent.

This collapse of reason and its accompanying deformation of self-confidence into dismissal and exclusion are self-evident in the routine reporting practice and editorial policies of the managers controlling academic and scientific production and the propaganda theater most people still like to call journalism, among the board members and staff of influential non governmental organizations, among the personnel of international institutions and also among the managerial class controlling artistic and cultural production.

Given the intense concentration of political and economic power among the Western oligarchs who have successfully conspired to control all these sectors, the resulting general unanimity of presuppositions among their respective subaltern intellectual and cultural managerial classes is as much to be expected as their complete lack of accountability. Anyone openly challenging or contradicting received wisdom is marginalized and ostracised in what is a truly authentic class warfare waged by North American and European oligarchs against their own peoples and the majority world.

In response, as a class phenomenon, the proliferation of independent reporting outlets reflects not just underlying genuine popular outrage at being permanently misled. It is also a correspondingly authentic, resilient grassroots challenge to the status quo.

Conventional liberal or social democrat opinion gauges the authenticity of independent reporting by the criteria of financial and/or editorial independence. But a low budget is no guarantee of integrity and a genuinely independent information outlet may or may not be ideologically aligned with a foreign political movement or government. Under contemporary conditions a more authentic criteria of reporting independence is the degree of legitimate defence of governments and peoples who are victims of the crimes of Western ruling elites.

Truly independent reporting takes this position while at the same time using conventional reporting norms to cover issues and events Western mainstream and alternative media obfuscate or conceal. Doing so necessarily endows genuinely independent reporting outlets, regardless of their political allegiances, with class characteristics by the very nature of their readiness to expose contradictions in accounts of events and issues produced by corporate capitalist information outlets.

Paradoxically or not, class solidarity with the victims of imperialist crimes becomes the principal criteria of reporting independence both in terms of what is reported and too how it is reported. For the moment, that means being in solidarity with the world’s peoples defending their basic rights against Western ruling class aggression.

This text was produced by Stephen Sefton with research by Lauren Smith and comments from others.

This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal.

Author Stephen Sefton is a renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

HOW ONE SPOOK-RUN LONDON COLLEGE DEPT IS TRAINING THE WORLD’S SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERS

Staffed by NATO military officers and former government ministers and notorious for training the West’s top spies, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London is also providing the workforce for many of the largest social media companies. This includes Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Twitter.

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“Synthetic Left” Joins “Corporate Right” in Getting Ukraine War Wrong

Since the Russian military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine began in late February, there is a common misperception that the Western left is “split” over the conflict in its response.

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Kyiv Independent: The Western Media’s Direct Link to Asov Battalion

As the Russian attack on Ukraine has come to dominate global news feeds, so has a previously little-known outlet called The Kyiv Independent. Since its inception in November of last year, the Independent’s profile has risen rapidly and has been promoted and endorsed by both social media giants and the corporate press. Why?

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This is How the Russian Military Treat Captured Ukrainian Soldiers

The Ukrainian Nazis have shown the world how they treated their captured Russian combatants and civilians with barbarism. This is in deep contrast to how the Russian Army treated captured Ukrainian military personnel according to Laws of War.

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The War Propaganda Changes its Shape

If the Russian army has won the war against the Banderites in Ukraine, NATO has won the cognitive war against its own citizens in the West. The Atlantic Alliance has developed a new form of propaganda based on what it denounced a short time ago: Fake News, that is to say not false information, but biased information. How to protect yourself from it?

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I Was Used to Create Fake News About ‘Russian Air Strike’ on Maternity Hospital

Photos snapped by an Associated Press photographer of a pregnant woman at a demolished Mariupol hospital which Western media claimed had been “bombed by Russian forces” spread like wildfire, with US and European officials and media characterising the incident as evidence of Russian “war crimes”.

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Intrepid Ground Reporter Finds Russians Welcomed as Liberators in West Propagandized Henichesk City

Propaganda has been spread on the Wikipedia page of Henichesk, stating the following: “On 24 February 2022, Henichesk was captured by the Russian Army in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was where the famous incident occurred where an old woman confronted Russian soldiers and said ‘Put sunflower seeds in your pockets so they grow on Ukraine soil when you die,’ as well as the death of Vitalii Shakun blowing up a bridge to stop their advance.”

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Ukraine’s Propaganda War: International PR Firms, DC Lobbyists and CIA Cutouts

Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath.

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This is What Liberal War Fever Looks Like

We all know that the western media’s Ukraine coverage has been highly charged, playing on western feelings of sympathy for (some) underdog ‘victims’, and directing feelings towards a moral outrage that insists – even demands – retribution and punishment for the perceived perpetrators.

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The Real Situation in Ukraine

Mainstream audience watching mainstream media are now celebrating the entry of NATO [weapons delivery] to counter Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine, and have already formed a rosy picture about an impending Russian defeat amidst a “valiant resistance” offered by the Ukrainian military. They should be ready for the shock of a lifetime.

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The 400,000 American Jobs China Created in Boston that You’ve Never Heard About

The Chinese ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, was recently presented a plaque of recognition and a commemorative jacket by the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) and the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), a major labor union. 

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How Bill Gates Bankrolls The Guardian that Claims Not Backed by Billionaires

It likes to tap its readers for donations by claiming it’s funded by them, not the mega-wealthy. But, in reality, billionaires have forked out millions to support the UK’s premier right-on, left-of-centre newspaper.

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How The CIA Took Over U.S. Media

The Zionists are in control of the political affairs of the United States through bribery and blackmail, while the Nazis, through the CIA, a brainchild of the Jesuit High Command, are in control of the media through fear alone. There’s, of course, an overlapping of tasks between various segments of the Dark Cabal, not only to confuse its enemies, but more to portray the idea that they are too big and powerful. – CG

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The Real ‘Russian Playbook’ is Written in English

I hadn’t given The Russian Playbook much attention until Susan Rice, Obama’s quondam security advisor, opined a month ago on CNN that “I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days — but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook“. She was referring to the latest U.S. riots.

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