Disinformation, trolls, bots, propaganda!!! The tweets and headlines complain. “Our enemies are subverting our democracy”, shout the politicians. “Use the media you can trust”, say the editors.
If at any point up till now the thought of Russia or China popped into your head, go stand in the corner, face the wall and think very hard about what a bad, little child you’ve been – unless you’re Russian or Chinese, then you’re entitled to worry about what your own media is telling you. If you’re British or American this is a sure sign you’ve been influenced by propaganda. Not because the Russian and Chinese government are lovely, cuddly bunnies that would never, ever do anything so nasty as lie to you, but because your side needs to distract you from talking about our own crimes and focus on THE ENEMY (cue portentous music).
Whatever it is that THE ENEMY are doing to mislead people, they’re putting far more effort into doing it to their own people than to anyone in the West. And if you’re thinking that their people are just gullible fools, lapping up whatever nonsense they are being told through official channels, then hang your head in racist shame. If anything, their propaganda is often relatively unsophisticated, particularly in China, so not only are they just as qualified as a westerner to analyse their news, its often easy to know when not to trust something. Understanding that western propaganda has evolved into a highly sophisticated and complex operation, aimed not at THE ENEMY population, but you, is the fundamental principle behind trying to understand what’s going on in the world.
You are THE ENEMY.
We are led to believe that propaganda is something that only happens in other places but it is so insidiously effective in the West because many don’t know it’s being done to them. Most news consumers can grasp the concept of bias or politicians lying. It’s also widely understood that media barons like Murdoch launder their political concerns through the outlets they own. Less understood is how this is achieved through self censoring journalists, in a system that filters out any dissent from the acceptable range of opinion – as Chomsky explains in this interview. However, even fewer can conceive the vast system of manipulation that goes into shaping public opinion.
The CIA has spent a large part of its existence fooling the population at home and abroad to justify it’s crimes abroad and has always been intimately linked with the media and entertainment. That should come as no surprise but there seems to be a disconnect with this self evident truth when it comes to reading and watching the news. Every CIA invented narrative justifying intervention in Latin America has been mindlessly regurgitated by the media yet, no matter how often these are debunked, every time a new one comes along, people lap it up. Former head of the CIA Mike Pompeo has even said, “we lied, we cheated we stole”, and shamelessly laughed about it. Knowing this, the media still trustingly quote, “anonymous intelligence officials said…”, as if it had some air of authority. These same officials then get well paid jobs in the media as expert commentators, as if they were going to do anything but continue to promote the same false narratives their previous job paid them to do.
The UK has its own shadowy groups like the 77th Brigade and the Integrity Initiative who exist purely to misinform you, but the media remains entirely complicit in the deception by not reporting on their work.
Here the CIA is clearly laying out how it’s going to sell us the war
If there’s a war, coup, uprising, protest movement going on somewhere, there’s someone behind it making sure you’re being sold the narrative they want. The same people are also suppressing the things that conflict with that narrative, which is why you didn’t hear much about the brutal violence carried out by the so called democracy protesters in Hong Kong, for instance, or the violent fascism of the coup leaders in Bolivia. When you’re presented with a story of the goodies vs the baddies, it’s almost always at least much more complex or often even the complete reversal of the truth.
Even though it would be foolish to deny the possibility of THE ENEMY ever trying to mislead the English speaking native, the idea that it has any significant effect when compared to the deluge of disinformation from our own sources is simply fanciful. With tiresome regularity, journalists or commentators who dare question the establishment position are denounced as being in the pay of THE ENEMY. However, the entirety of the evidence produced in the time since Trump was elected of this ever being the case is the best part of fuck all. Ask yourself how long any relatively prominent anti establishment voice, journalist or web site could keep hidden ENEMY government funding. With the level of intrusive surveillance carried out by the various intelligence services, anyone with a big enough profile to make a difference would have been discovered long ago.
This constant repetition of unfounded claims, such as anyone with the WRONG OPINION being funded by THE ENEMY, is a key weapon being used against us all the time. Remember, most people scan the headlines, maybe read a paragraph or two of some pieces, skim read and only thoroughly read articles they find of real interest. So, after weeks or months of the casual repetition of THE LIE, it gets into the public consciousness via osmosis. People begin to think, “it must be true, I’ve seen it written so often”.
The more deliberate extension of this kind of policy is what expert media analysis duo, Media Lens, call the Propaganda Blitz: establishment manipulators unleash a sustained wave of reports, with a specific aim, usually to discredit a person, organisation, government etc., most likely left wing in persuasion, or push an agenda, such as why we need to bomb some brown skinned people in a land far away who you hadn’t realised were THE ENEMY. (If you haven’t read their book or are not following Media Lens, why not?) Just because the media has been telling you the same thing for months or even years doesn’t make it any more true than on day 1. Once the LIE has been sufficiently engrained like this, anyone daring to question it is vilified as a denier of truth.
Repetition is designed to enforce a narrative, a key concept that Caitlin Johnstone has often wisely written about. Narratives are of course always gross simplifications at best, often bordering on the absurd (noble, moderate Syrian rebels fighting against the evil Assad dictatorship) or utterly bogus (the UK is a force for good in the world). A narrative can easily survive the occasional, critical headline or contradictory news report, as the repetition does the job of enforcing THE NARRATIVE. In fact, the occasional opposing view serves to create the illusion of a free press, when in reality anyone who oversteps the line finds their mainstream career crashing to a halt, (as when Chris Hedges dared question the Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) narrative at the New York Times) or ends up in prison like Julian Assange. Note how often the Guardian for instance saves many pieces critical of foreign policy to the opinion pages, so as not to openly conflict with THE NARRATIVE.
This is a good point to ask, “who are these people manipulating the news”? Some might unleash the caps lock with the undefined THEY, or refer to the mysterious deep state, or as the popular alternative news voice, James Corbett amusingly puts it, The Powers That Shouldn’t Be. The reality is that it could be any one, or a combination from a big list: politicians, intelligence services, military, think tanks, covert propaganda organisations, analysts, corporations, the media themselves and more. The point is that whoever it is, they are promoting the interests of what I think is best called the establishment: the people at the top of the power and money pile who prefer that the world operates as they wish, without having annoying plebs like you and I sticking our noses into their business as usual.
With such a huge range of vested interests potentially influencing almost any piece of international news, you have to know who is telling it to you and who gave them that information. Without knowing that you can’t make any assessment on its validity, bias or accuracy. Almost every article will be tainted in some way, regardless of where you stand on an issue. That doesn’t mean everything is unreliable as such, just that even without dubious intent, one article will never be the whole picture. However, there is almost always dubious intent lurking somewhere in any mainstream media piece, even if it is just one statistic quoted from one report.
Perhaps reports are the most important occasion to ask who’s behind something. It’s not just knowing who the people were that wrote the report, but who funded them. You will almost never see a report that disagrees with the narrative proposed by those who paid for it. When that happens you simply never see the report, at least in the form it was originally produced. Many news items can simply be dismissed by asking this question, or at the very least set the alarm bells ringing so you know to dig deeper. Some organisations may have a reputation for independence but that doesn’t mean they do so on every subject matter, so again you’re required to do more digging. Groups like Human Rights Watch give the impression of independence because of the subject matter but are in reality deeply compromised by the state. Even the establishment friendly Wikipedia has a page devoted to criticism of them.
If an article refers to a report but doesn’t provide an actual reference for it, then in all likelihood it’s irrelevant. If you see the words to the effect of, “anonymous sources in the intelligence services said…”, you can have complete faith that it is utter bollocks designed to mislead you. If the subject is of interest to you, make sure you read the whole of the article. You’ll be surprised how often articles debunk themselves in the last couple of paragraphs, with lines like, “while there is no actual evidence, experts have told us blah blah blah…”. These are all signs that you’re being sold a narrative.
Independent media and journalists are absolutely essential in unearthing the funding and influential links behind reports and organisations quoted in the mainstream media (MSM). Without them, the whole picture you build up of the world is fundamentally wrong. That doesn’t make independent media perfect but that’s a story for another day.
One law that must never be discounted is that no lie is too big – if you haven’t learnt that lesson from the Iraq weapons of mass destruction (WMD) then you really ought to give up on following the news. Now you have to consider that the entirety of western MSM has clearly failed to learn that lesson. Every war since then, particularly Libya and Syria has been completely misrepresented by the same media who parroted the Iraq WMD lies. Not one single claim of Russiagate’s numerous allegations of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election has withstood subsequent analysis. However, despite being completely wrong the whole time, on one of the biggest stories in U.S. politics in decades, almost no one has acknowledged, reported or apologised for the lies and grossly negligent reporting. Indeed, Trumps popularization of the term fake news led to interminable years of articles exhorting us to combat it by trusting these self same purveyors of the lies. Yet, still we’re supposed to believe that Putin is the arch Machiavellian election manipulator on this basis. Does this make Trump nice guy? No. Does this make Putin eminently trustworthy? No. But ask yourself, if the lies can get this big with no one losing their job, (in fact many responsible have been promoted), and no one being punished, except for some of those who got the stories right in the first place, then why should you take at face value anything the same people are telling you? The same journalists, intelligence officers, politicians and generals that lied and lied again are the people we’re told to trust.
Omission is possibly the greatest sin, because you simply don’t know what’s missing. Sometimes a key facet of an issue will simply be left out, at other times the story will ignored in its entirety. If you only follow the MSM you will almost certainly know nothing about the OPCW scandal, where whistle-blowers from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons placed doubt not just on the last chemical weapons attack in Syria but the integrity of the entire organisation and hence a large part of the narrative about the use of such weapons in Syria. To suggest that a story of such magnitude is not worthy of at least some coverage is so preposterous that it’s perfectly clear there is an agenda to misinform the public. Numerous experts have backed the whistle-blowers and the subject has even been raised at the UN. Even if it could somehow be proved that the evidently complicit OPCW leadership was innocent, it would have still warranted news coverage, but in two years the only mentions have been blatant propaganda by the establishment in attempts to discredit people involved. If the case was just Russian disinformation as the establishment claims, then debunk it in public. No lie is too big for the media to completely ignore it, when covering the story would reveal the true depths the establishment is prepared to go to justify war.
If you have followed the story you’ll know that most of the attacks against journalists like Aaron Mate who’ve covered the issue, usually fail to deal with the substance of the issue. By focussing on details, which even if correct wouldn’t detract from the overall story, they hope to discredit the reporting. The vast majority of attacks are nothing more than unsubstantiated claims that anyone who believes it is a supporter of Assad and Putin. Not only is it not true, it’s just a distraction from the issue. Being a supporter of a political figure can be a useful indicator of bias, or even worse but it doesn’t prove anything in itself. This applies to all sides of an argument: those debunking establishment narratives can’t just say, “look they’re backed by DUBIOUS GOVT ENTITY”, and leave it at that as proof. If however, someone is concealing their funding by DUBIOUS GOVT ENTITY, or refuses to engage with critics over that backing or funding then there’s good reason to question their motives. Bellingcat in particular get very tetchy about their funding and prefer you ignore the fact that it is largely staffed by ex military and intelligence operatives.
Even significantly impacting friends in big business can bring down the shutters of silence. Take the HSBC credit charge scandal, possibly the biggest banking fraud in UK history that was completely ignored until a partial resolution in a court case eventually occurred, solely due to the efforts over many years and at great personal cost of one determined whistle-blower.
Any one subject can combine all of the issues discussed. Take the claims of genocide against the Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province. Central to the claims are reports by an “academic” called Adrian Zenz and every MSM outlet has referenced his work. So who is he? On a personal level he’s at the extreme end of evangelical Christianity with intolerant views on homosexuality and gender equality among other things and says he’s on a mission from God against China. Whilst that does not necessarily discredit his work, if that doesn’t give you some cause for concern, then you’ll be glad to hear the entirety of English speaking MSM is of the same mind. Who does he work for? The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. If the name itself doesn’t give you an indication of possible bias, then consider that included in their figures for the numbers who were victims of Communism are the Nazis killed in WWII and the global deaths from Covid!
If that doesn’t give you some cause for concern, then you’ll be glad to hear the entirety of English speaking MSM is of the same mind.
His inspiration for writing his first report on the “genocide” was an offer of payment by the BBC, after he’d expressed the view that there didn’t seem to be enough evidence to support it.
If that doesn’t give you some cause for concern, then you’ll be glad to hear the entirety of English speaking MSM is of the same mind.
Of course, being a trusted academic he’d have flown out to China to gather some evidence. No, he went there on holiday once years ago. Obviously he must speak Uighur or Mandarin well as he’s such an expert on his area of study. No, he doesn’t.
If that doesn’t give you some cause for concern, then you’ll be glad to hear the entirety of English speaking MSM is of the same mind.
When you get to his report you’ll find that it’s riddled with basic mathematical errors, a grossly distorted use of statistics and blatant mistranslations of Chinese.
If that doesn’t give you some cause for concern, then you’ll be glad to hear the entirety of English speaking MSM is of the same mind.
So, even the most charitable analysis of the media coverage of the subject is proof of monstrous negligence. If we have one key player in a story clearly highly disposed to producing disinformation, as well as being unqualified and serially incompetent and literally no major media outlet has reported these facts, what makes you think you’re being told the truth about the rest of it? To my knowledge, despite there being numerous reports alleging Uighur genocide, not a single one of them has been fact checked by any major media outlet. Whereas independent media has found huge problems with every single one of them. It’s hard to believe that any MSM journalist has ever got much further than the summary. If all this is news to you, I suggest you start here.
Most of you of course simply don’t have the time to devote to getting closer to the truth and believe me it can consume a lot of time, even in one subject area. Understanding some subjects can be a process that evolves over weeks, months or even years. I’m blessed, or maybe cursed, with a life where I can often spend several hours a day investigating matters of interest and I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to burden themselves with that. At the bare minimum you have to understand that on many subjects you are being lied to on an industrial scale and on most subjects you are being nudged one way or another. As many a mystic has rightly said, “knowing that you know nothing is the first step on the road to enlightenment”.
