Gina Haspel and Pinocchio from Rome
Being in Rome, Italy and thinking of Gina Haspel, the CIA nominee and admitted torturer who says her “moral conscience” has changed after the fact, seems most fitting. Wherever you go in central Rome, you can hear the screams and smell the blood of those tortured and killed by the Roman Empire and those who ably followed in their stead. And you can see the crumbled stones and the pathetic architectural remains of those who thought they had triumphed. Their triumph turned to dust, and their belated mea culpas, if and when they ever came, always rang as hollow as Gina Haspel’s, Lt. William Calley’s, and Adolph Eichmann’s excuses that they were only doing their jobs and following orders.
Throughout Rome there are hawkers dangling Pinocchio trinkets in your face, constant reminders of the cost of lying. Or perhaps more aptly, the fame that ensues from lying followed by a childish semi-apology, even when it’s as obvious as the nose on your face that you are lying still. So in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Haspel was asked by Senator Mark Warner, D-VA., the kind of question that allows a respondent to answer in a deceptive way that means nothing, but seems profoundly sincere. Warned asked:
If this president asked you to do something that you find morally objectionable, even if there is an [Office of Legal Counsel] opinion, what will you do? Will you carry out that order or not?
To which Haspel replied:
Senator, my moral conscience is strong. I would not allow the CIA to carry out any activity that I thought was immoral – even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.
From all reports, neither Warner’s nor Haspel’s nose grew longer, but perhaps such deceptive phrasing slyly falls beyond the parameters of Pinocchio’s sins and the Blue Fairy’s sanctions.
So the woman who oversaw detainee torture at a CIA “black site” in Thailand tells us she has a strong moral conscience, but she doesn’t tell us what that conscience considers intrinsically evil, if anything. Nor what that “strong” moral conscience considers moral or immoral in any way, just that the “CIA must undertake activities that are consistent with American values,” whatever they might be. And if she were ordered to carry out an action – let’s say kill a foreign agent or assassinate a political leader – that was technically illegal but accorded with her strong moral conscience, would she do so? Don’t ask; she wasn’t. Even Pinocchio would get confused with this legerdemain, and his “strong” moral conscience, Jiminy Cricket, would be utterly bamboozled.
The good Senator, adept at playing deceptive verbal games as befits his stature, is happy to have his non-question answered with a non-answer, and both he and Haspel are happy. Good question, good answer, good conscience. Nothing bad about that. Then Warner goes and votes for Haspel, who he says is “among the most experienced people to be nominated” to head the CIA, and Haspel says she thinks torture – excuse me, “enhanced interrogation” – doesn’t work anyway. Practicality wins the day.
Sen. Warner (and other politicians) throwing softballs at Gina Haspel, in effort to maintain the myth that the empire cares about morality, or the legality of its actions. As a reader put it, this whole exercise was just “a display of virtue signaling and a dog-and-pony show for the public.”
But here in Rome so many regular people are not so practical. They seem to relish life, not as a task to accomplish, but as a pleasure to enjoy. Despite the history that surrounds them, and the dismal political economy that weighs heavy on their lives and country, they seem less anxious and terrorized than Americans. Of course this may be a visitor’s myopic vision, and when seen clearly, Romans might be as stressed as Americans. But I doubt it.
But for this visiting American, it is hard to dismiss thoughts about the disgraceful charade happening back in Washington D.C. Thinking here in Rome of the Haspel vote, I am reminded of the ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles’s and long-time Chief of Counterintelligence James Angleton’s organized “Ratlines,” the escape routes for Nazi and fascist killers and torturers, so many of whom were brought to the United States and other countries after World War II through Italy to help the newly formed CIA torture the truth out of detainees and assassinate opponents. Operation Paperclip, they called it. No big deal; just a joining of two like-minded organizations by a tiny device.
Post September 11 torture is nothing new, and Haspel is nothing if not a traditionalist just doing her job. Is this what Haspel meant by “American values”? Many victims would attest to that.
NOT REALLY GRILLED. MORE LIKE AN AGREED ON MINUET, WITH EACH PLAYER DOING HIS PART.
Nothing but legitimating theater for the masses consumption.
In an old city like Rome one tends to think old thoughts: that the history of torture, human treachery, lying, and violence has a long history; that secular and religious fanatics are nothing new; and that empires rise and fall and everyone dies, even those who build monuments to their own “glorious” deeds.
But if one wanders around Rome and through life with no itinerary, one also encounters beautiful people and small pockets of faith, love, and devotion. One encounters magnificent art that embodies the heights to which humans can aspire. One realizes that despite the gory history of the human race, the killers and torturers, humans have and do rise above their worst inclinations and do the work of angels, despite the devils.
As we were sitting at a café in the Piazza della Rotonda, my wife said to me, “You have your back to the Pantheon.” It was true. Those monumental gods bored me. My glass of vino rosso whirled my mind to better things. Lighter. Not stone idolatry. Not empires, except their death. Not stone gods, nor inquisitors or black sites or hooded torturers with Ph’ds from Harvard. No palaces to Renaissance princes or Central Intelligence agents, corrupt bastards of different times and places. No Wall Street/CIA nexus. No dastardly gross stupid rich Trump with his orange hair and phallic towers, nor his doppelganger Berlusconi here in Italy. No basilicas, nothing petrified, despite the city of stone that enclosed me. Like the sparrow that alighted on the next table and was pecking at the bread in a basket, my thoughts flew to lighter and more sustaining images of life and love and the spirit of care that sustains this beautiful world despite the torturers and killers.
Gina Haspel seemed so far away – yet so very near. My thoughts kept returning to all the U.S. Senators who have voted for this torturer to lead the CIA. Will they say they were only doing their jobs and following orders? Do they think of themselves as civilized?
I then looked up as the bird took flight and saw a cross silhouetted against the blue sky. Enough said.
Where will we conduct the next Nuremberg trials?
Educated in the classics, philosophy, literature, theology, and sociology, Ed Curtin teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He states: "I write as a public intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. I believe a non-committal sociology is an impossibility and therefore see all my work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding." His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/ .
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
By Chris Marsden, wsws.org With the masses thirsting for muscular leadership, Corbyn's basically Fabian style may prove too timid to properly ignite a reconstruction of Labour, or a (at last) shift to authentic socialist goals. Marx repudiated the central premise of reformism when drawing the fundamental lesson of the Paris Commune of 1871. The first attempt by the working class to take power into its own hands ended in the slaughter of up to 20,000 Communards. Marx concluded that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” The modern state functioned as “the national power of capital over labour,” a “public force organized for social enslavement” and “an engine of class despotism.” The working class must overthrow the bourgeois state and establish its own state power, tasked with the “expropriation of the expropriators.” Chris Marsden's address at the 2018 International Online May Day Rally The history of the revolutionary socialist movement is one of implacable hostility to the advocates of reformism, of the constant exposure of their pretensions and falsehoods to break their influence over the working class. In 1938, Leon Trotsky gave a speech on the founding of the Fourth International, in which he declared, “Our aim is the full material and spiritual liberation of the toilers and exploited through the socialist revolution. Nobody will prepare it and nobody will guide it but ourselves.” He contrasted the Fourth International with the “old Internationals,” which were “rotten through and through. The great events which rush upon mankind will not leave of these outlived organizations one stone upon another.” That prediction is now being realised. The Stalinist parties are either husks, or, in the case of China, the new organising nexus of the bourgeoisie. The Social Democratic parties of Europe, which once advocated a reformist road to socialism, are going the same way. Today, the average share of their vote in western European countries is just 22 percent. The German SPD, supported by less than a fifth of the electorate, is in a second grand coalition, propping up the right-wing CDU. But only another five EU states—Malta, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia—have social democrats in government. Some parties, such as France’s Socialist Party, have suffered a collapse to single figure support, including in Greece, where the name “Pasokification” was given to this phenomenon. The Blairite think-tank, Prospect, proclaims, “Social democracy, the most influential force in European politics for decades, is dying.” They should know, because the party they dubbed “New Labour” was in the vanguard of the political shift to a nakedly pro-business, pro-privatisation, pro-austerity and pro-war agenda that has ended in electoral meltdown. The working class, particularly the younger generation, has abandoned the old parties in disgust at what they have done. Moreover, the “broad left” parties, meant to supposedly replace these despised formations, have themselves been discredited. This is epitomised by Syriza in Greece, which came to power based on a pledge to oppose austerity, only to implement cuts worse than those that led to the collapse of PASOK. Syriza is now in head-on conflict with the working class, after having privatised 14 regional airports, the Port of Piraeus, Thessaloniki seaport, cut pensions by 40 percent, with another 20 percent cut to follow, eviscerated the health service, shed tens of thousands of jobs, brought in anti-strike laws, embraced NATO and a military alliance with Israel. I speak to you from a country which is supposedly bucking this trend—where the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015 is meant to have signalled a rebirth of the Labour Party. This is the narrative pushed by Britain’s pseudo-left groups—who declared Corbyn’s victory a step towards Labour’s re-founding “as a democratic, socialist, anti-austerity party.” Events have already disproved such claims. We have documented, as a party, every retreat made by Corbyn to meet the dictates of the right wing of the Labour Party and of big business. Rather than oppose austerity, Corbyn instructed Labour councils to impose the cuts demanded by the Tories, while his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell dedicates his days to courting the City of London. Rather than mobilise workers against militarism and war, Corbyn has capitulated on every key issue—allowing free votes on war in Syria and the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons programme, as part of NATO’s military build-up against Russia. In our appraisal of Corbyn and Labour, we base ourselves on the rich legacy of the Marxist movement and on the analysis made by the International Committee of the Fourth International. “Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers,” wrote Lenin, describing it as a “disease.” With the line-up of the social democrats behind their own ruling classes in the First World War, he wrote of the monstrous victory of opportunism—a tendency rooted in “a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist super-profits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement.” Without a struggle against these parties, he said, “there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement.” Trotsky said of Britain’s Labour “lefts:” “Workers must at all costs be shown these self-satisfied pedants, drivelling eclectics, sentimental careerists and liveried footmen of the bourgeoisie in their true colours. To show them up for what they are means to discredit them beyond repair.” Groups such as the Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, et al., pass over more than a century of the history of the Labour Party and similar formations. For decades, figures far to the left of Corbyn headed factions or led parties in which millions placed their trust, and which had implemented measures that significantly benefitted the working class—such as the founding of Britain’s National Health Service. Even then, every effort to transform them along socialist lines failed. But those days are long-gone. The lurch to the right by the social democrats is not the result of a few bad leaders. How does this account for the universal character of this process? It was the necessary response of pro-capitalist parties and politicians to the profound changes associated with globalised production, the integration of finance and manufacturing and the domination of the world economy by transnational corporations. This rendered the reformist programme of securing social concessions, within the framework of the nation state through class collaboration, moribund. To compete in globalised markets, the ruling class demanded of the social democrats, and the trade unions on which they rest, that they impose savage cuts and betray strikes—which they have done now for decades. In the process, their relationship to the working class has undergone a fundamental shift, as they have become ever more directly the servants of the financial oligarchy. The pseudo-left groups claim that this has all changed, because Labour is led by a nice man, with progressive intent. However, their support for Corbyn is not based on such stupid misconceptions, but on political calculations rooted in definite social interests. They represent an upper middle-class stratum that views revolution as a threat to the substantial privileges they enjoy, often as advisers to the labour bureaucracy or leading functionaries within the trade union apparatus. Close to a century and a half after Marx wrote on the Paris Commune, the perspective of the pseudo-left groups is to “lay-hold” not of the state, but of Jeremy Corbyn—and to ride his coat-tails into the machinery of government. This is what their co-thinkers have done in Greece, with Syriza, Portugal’s Left Bloc, Die Linke in Germany and Podemos in Spain. Should Corbyn come to power, his actions would be the same as those of Syriza—to betray the political mandate he was given, and pursue the austerity and militarism demanded by the raging crisis of British and world imperialism. The Socialist Equality Party bases its perspective not on ephemeral illusions in figures such as Corbyn, Alexis Tsipras or Pablo Iglesias, but on the reality of existing social relations. There is no possibility of a return to the reformist past of the Labour Party. We live in an era of escalating class struggle, not class compromise, of blood and iron, that can only be transcended through world socialist revolution. In the bicentenary year of his birth, the future belongs to Marx, and to the great revolutionary tradition defended by Lenin and Trotsky, and embodied today in the parties of the ICFI. Parting shot—a word from the editorsThe death of reformism: Corbyn and the “broad left”
A compelling piece, with which we largely agree, especially in its treatment of reformist and social democratic parties. However, as it frequently happens, as independent, Marxian but non-Trotskyist leftists, we disagree with the author on his characterisation of certain other processes, such as his views on China, and the negative obsession with Stalin, which, in the Trotskyists' case, while perfectly logical, may also distort the lens in appraising some complicated historical events.
“Reformism is bourgeois deception of the workers,” wrote Lenin, describing it as a “disease.”
The following speech was delivered by Chris Marsden, national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), the British section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, for the past 20 years.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Deafening Democratic Silence on Gaza Is Because They Own It Too
By Bruce A. Dixon, BAR managing editor
Obama in Israel: Toadying up to the Israel lobby, a must-do for all American politicians. Hypocrisy of magnificent proportions on all sides.
"Democratic party leaders are as always firmly behind their Israeli clients, and their party machinery remains under lock and key."
Gruesome as the latest Israeli atrocities are, with over 70 murdered and a couple thousand civilians deliberately shot by IDF snipers, it will not be the turning point in relations between the US empire and its Israeli client state. The brutal military campaigns against Gaza in 2009 and 2014 killed thousands, wounded tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands with a Democrat in the White House.
Despite some DSA victories in western Pennsylvania, despite demurrals from Bernie Sanders and a handful of House members, and whatever qualms Democratic voters might have, Democratic party leaders are as always firmly behind their Israeli clients, and their party machinery remains under lock and key.
Kamala Harris: new and certifiably demagogic face being media primed by the Democrats. As phony as a $3 dollar bill. Has already made the requisite fealty to Israel pilgrimages to AIPAC.
Even as Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump cut the ribbon opening the US embassy in Jerusalem, and hundreds of Palestinians were being gunned down, Democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer declared the latest provocation was “long overdue” and affirmed it as the official policy of both US ruling class parties. California Senator Kamala Harris, widely considered her party’s front runner for the 2020 presidential nomination addressed AIPAC publicly in 2017 and privately this year. In 2017 she embraced the settler myth that “Israel made the desert bloom” bragging that she helped by collecting funds to plant trees on the sites of massacres and dispossessions.
No fewer than 24 states have enacted bipartisan legislation to publicly identify and blacklist individuals or corporations that do business with individuals and entities publicly identified as BDS-friendly. (South Carolina already regards any criticism of Israel as a hate crime.—Ed). Similar legislation has been introduced in a dozen more states and in the US Senate. Israel trains thousands of US police each year for hundreds of local departments from big cities, universities and state cop shops to small towns and rural counties. It’s no wonder that US corporate news media portrayed the latest Israeli massacre as a bizarre act of self-defense at Israel’s borders, as though the gun line around the world’s largest concentration camp, population 2 million, were an international frontier.
The connection between both US ruling parties and the settler state of Israel is bone-deep and organic, though it may not be especially popular among rank and file Democrats. Most tellingly, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which traditionally pre-selects congressional candidates for loyalty to corporate power and empire, and funnels tens of millions for election cycle to the most right wing Democrats it can find, is sponsoring no fewer than 40 candidates with State Department, Homeland Security and military intelligence backgrounds in 2018 Democratic primaries across the country.
"When Bernie and Barber bray about a two state solution nobody ever asks them out loud why the racist ethnocracy of Israel must be preserved, in their imaginary construction, as a neighbor to Palestine."
Among the leftmost Democrat elected and selected leaders are Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and North Carolina’s Rev. William Barber, anointed heir of Dr. King and head of the New Poor Peoples Campaign. Both Sanders and Barber call for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine horror, as if forty years of facts on the ground, from the apartheid wall to the land, sea and air blockades of Gaza, and the network of Jewish-only roads, encroaching settlements and military checkpoints didn’t exist, and as if Israel didn’t control the electric and water grids, even the aquifers beneath Gaza and the fishing rights offshore, issue the paychecks of Palestinian civil servants and determine the budgets of Palestinian government agencies.
When Bernie and Barber bray about a two state solution nobody ever asks them out loud why the racist ethnocracy of Israel must be preserved, in their imaginary construction, as a neighbor to Palestine. It’s just something Democrats are committed to. There is no land and no resources out of which to make a viable Palestinian state, the Israelis have taken or blockaded everything of value except the humans living there.
Governments based upon race and ethnocracy have no legitimacy in the modern world, except among US Democrats and Republicans, themselves heir to a nation built with stolen labor upon stolen land. US ruling class media faithfully follow the script, reporting on the latest Israeli massacres as though they were natural disasters the Palestinians somehow brought upon themselves by refusing to meekly submit to conquest and expulsion by the US backed state of Israel.
For a generation now, it’s been obvious to everybody paying attention that a just solution to the problems of Israel-Palestine is only possible under a single small d democratic state which respects the rights of all the people living in the territory. But this is a place a party of the US ruling class cannot go. It would mean repudiation of the racist ethnocracy that is today’s Israel. And no matter what Democrat grassroots say they want, Democratic party leaders won’t let that happen and have made sure there are no ways to make it happen.
For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com, and our audio releases each week on SoundCloud, iTunes and other podcasting apps. In the wake of our being named by the Washington Post as the only black news and commentary source under the presumed influence of the Russians, Google and other corporate social media have gamed and suppressed out visibility on the web. So the ONLY way to be sure you’re getting news, commentary and analysis from the black left is to visit our web site and hit the subscribe button so that each week’s content from Black Agenda Report arrives directly in your email inbox.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the GA Green Party, which unlike Democrats and Republicans unequivocally supports network neutrality. He lives and works in Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
The Friendly Mask Of The Orwellian Oligarchy Is Slipping Off
Gina Haspel has been confirmed as America’s new CIA Director, fulfilling her predecessor Mike Pompeo’s pledge to turn the CIA into “a much more vicious agency”. “Bloody Gina” has reportedly been directly involved in both torturing people and destroying evidence of torture in her long and depraved career, which some say hurts the CIA’s reputation.
Others say it just makes it more honest.
The lying, torturing, propagandizing, drug trafficking, coup-staging, warmongering Central Intelligence Agency has done some of the most unspeakably horrific things to human beings that have ever happened in the history of our species. If you think I’m exaggerating, do your own research into into some of the CIA’s activities like the Phoenix Program, which used “Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the ‘water treatment’; the ‘airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners,” and “The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages…The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to…both the women’s vaginas and men’s testicles [to] shock them into submission.”
This is what the CIA is. This is what the CIA has always been. This is what Mike Pompeo said he wanted to help make the CIA “much more vicious” than. Appointing Gina Haspel as head of the agency is just putting an honest face on it.
It really couldn’t be more fitting that the US now has an actual, literal torturer as the head of the CIA. It also couldn’t be more fitting that it has a reality TV star billionaire President, an Iraq-raping Bush-era neoconservative psychopath as National Security Advisor, a former defense industry director as Secretary of Defense, a former Goldman Sachs executive as Secretary Treasurer, and a former Rothschild, Inc. executive as Secretary of Commerce. These positions have always facilitated torture, oppression, war profiteering and Wall Street greed; the only thing that has changed is that they now have a more honest face on them.
The mask of the nationless Orwellian oligarchy which dominates our world is slipping off all over the place.
Israel is now openly massacring unarmed Palestinian civilians, prompting a UN investigation into possible war crimes. Only two nations voted in opposition to the investigation, and surprise surprise it was the two nations apart from Israel who most clearly owe their existence to the institutionalized slaughter and brutalization of their indigenous occupants in recent history: the US and Australia. All other members of the UN Human Rights Council either voted in support of the investigation or abstained.
UN to launch war crimes investigation into Israeli massacre of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza https://t.co/eLpkAkuhNR
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) May 18, 2018
Important to note that the US and Australia, two countries built on the genocide of the indigenous populations have objected to the UN inquiry and are effectively expressing support to Israel's on going genocide of the Palestinians.
— Tariq Zarif (@TariqZarif) May 18, 2018
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]nternet censorship is becoming more and more brazen as our governments become increasingly concerned that we are developing the wrong kinds of political opinions. Ever since the establishment Douma and Skripal narratives failed to take hold effectively, we’ve been seeing more and more frantic attempts to seize control of public discourse. Two weeks after the Atlantic Council explained to us that we need to be propagandized by our governments for our own good, Facebook finally made the marriage of Silicon Valley and the western war machine official by announcing a partnership with the Atlantic Council to ensure that we are all receiving properly authorized information.
The Atlantic Council is pure corruption, funded by powerful oligarchs, NATO, the US State Department, empire-aligned Gulf states and the military-industrial complex. Many threads of the establishment anti-Russia narrative trace back to this highly influential think tank, from the DNC hack to the discredited war propaganda firm Bellingcat to imaginary Russian trolls to the notorious McCarthyite PropOrNot blacklist publicized by the Washington Post. Facebook involving itself with this malignant warmongering psyop factory constitutes an open admission that the social media site considers it its duty to manipulate people into supporting the agendas of the western empire.
We’re seeing similar manipulations in Twitter, which recently announced that it will be hiding posts by more controversial accounts, and by Wikipedia, which has been brazenly editing the entries of anti-imperialist activists with a cartoonishly pro-establishment slant.
Announcing New Election Partnership with the Atlantic Council https://t.co/piSxpTDJfa
— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) May 17, 2018
At long last, the union of Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex becomes official. They've been dating for years, now they're finally tying the knot. This is your real royal wedding, everyone. https://t.co/3CkVtvBs0s
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 17, 2018
It is always a good sign when people in power become concerned that their subjects are developing the wrong kinds of political opinions, because it means that truth is winning. All this gibberish we’ve been hearing about “Russian disinformation” and “Russian propaganda” is just a label that has been pinned on dissenting narratives by a mass media propaganda machine that has lost control of the narrative.
And this is why it’s getting so overt, barely even attempting to conceal its true nature anymore. Our species’ newfound ability to network and share information has enabled a degree of free thinking that the cultural engineers did not anticipate and have not been able to stay ahead of, and they’re being forced to make more and more overt grabs to try and force us all back into our assigned brain boxes.
But the oligarchs who rule us and their Orwellian power structure are already in a lose-lose situation, because the empire that they have built for themselves rests upon the illusion of freedom and democracy. The most powerful rulers of our world long ago eschewed the old model of sitting on thrones and executing dissidents in the town square, instead taking on a hidden role of influence behind the official elected governments and using mass media propaganda to manufacture the consent of the governed.
Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
So the wealth-holding manipulators are stuck between a rock and a hard place now, trying to use new media outlets like Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia to herd the unwashed masses back into their pens. The more brazen they get with those manipulations, however, the more the mask slips off, and the greater the risk of the public realizing that they aren’t actually free from tyrannical rule and exploitation.
The real currency of this world is not backed by gold, nor by oil, nor by bureaucratic fiat, nor even by direct military might. No, the real currency of this world is narrative, and the ability to control it. The difference between those who rule this world and those who don’t is that those who rule understand this distinction and are sufficiently sociopathic to exploit it for their own benefit.
Power only exists where it exists because of the stories that humans agree to tell one another. The idea that government operates a certain way, that money operates a certain way, these things are purely conceptual constructs that are only as true as people pretend they are. Everyone could agree tomorrow that Donald Glover is the undisputed King of America and the new official US currency is old America Online trial CDs if they wanted to, and since that was the new dominant narrative it would be the reality. Everyone could also agree to create a new system which benefits all of humanity instead of a few sociopathic plutocrats. The only thing keeping money and government moving in a way that benefits our current rulers is the fact that those rulers have been successful in controlling the narrative.
They’ll never get that cat back into the bag once it’s out, and they know it. We the people will be able to create our own narratives and write our own rules about how things like money and government ought to operate, and there is no way that will work out to the benefit of the ruling manipulators and deceivers. So they fight with increasing aggression to lull us back to sleep, often overextending themselves and behaving in a way that gives the public a glimpse behind the mask of this entire corrupt power structure. Someday soon that mask will slip right off and come crashing to the floor. That crash will wake the baby, and that baby will not go back to sleep.
__________________________
Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing my daily articles is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report
Wikipedia Is An Establishment Psyop
If you haven’t been living in a hole in a cave with both fingers plugged into your ears, you may have noticed that an awful lot of fuss gets made about Russian propaganda and disinformation these days. Mainstream media outlets are now speaking openly about the need for governments to fight an “information war” against Russia, with headlines containing that peculiar phrase now turning up on an almost daily basis.
Here’s one published today titled “Border guards detain Russian over ‘information war’ on Poland“, about a woman who is to be expelled from that country on the grounds that she “worked to consolidate pro-Russian groups in Poland in order to challenge Polish government policy on historical issues and replace it with a Russian narrative” in order to “destabilize Polish society and politics.”
Here’s one published yesterday titled “Marines get new information warfare leader“, about a US Major General’s appointment to a new leadership position created “to better compete in a 21st century world.”
Here’s one from the day before titled “Here’s how Sweden is preparing for an information war ahead of its general election“, about how the Swedish Security Service and Civil Contingencies Agency are “gearing up their efforts to prevent disinformation during the election campaigns.”
This notion that the US and its allies are fighting against Russian “hybrid warfare” (by which they typically mean hackers and disinformation campaigns) has taken such deep root among think tanks, DC elites and intelligence/defense circles that it often gets unquestioningly passed on as fact by mass media establishment stenographers who are immersed in and chummy with those groups. The notion that these things present a real threat to the public is taken for granted to such an extent that they seldom bother to even attempt to explain to their audiences why we’re meant to be so worried about this new threat and what makes it a threat in the first place.
Which is, to put it mildly, really weird. Normally when the establishment cooks up a new Official Bad Guy they spell out exactly why we’re meant to be afraid of them. Marijuana will give us reefer madness and ruin our communities. Terrorists will come to where we live and kill us because they hate our freedom. Saddam Hussein has Weapons of Mass Destruction which can be used to perpetrate another 9/11. Kim Jong Un might nuke Hawaii any second now.
With this new “Russian hybrid warfare” scare, we’re not getting any of that. This notion that Russians are scheming to give westerners the wrong kinds of political opinions is presented as though having those political opinions is an inherent, intrinsic threat all on its own. The closest they typically ever get to explaining to us what makes “Russian disinformation” so threatening is that it makes us “lose trust in our institutions,” as though distrusting the CIA or the US State Department is somehow harmful and not the most logical position anyone could possibly have toward historically untrustworthy institutions. Beyond that we’re never given a specific explanation as to why this “Russian disinformation” thing is so dangerous that we need our governments to rescue us from it.
Two weeks after the Atlantic Council explained to us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, Facebook announces a new partnership with the Atlantic Council to make sure we're getting the right kinds of information.https://t.co/aXwHvxdREXhttps://t.co/3CkVtvBs0s pic.twitter.com/sEz52VjNTe
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 17, 2018
The reason we are not given a straight answer as to why we’re meant to want our institutions fighting an information war on our behalf (instead of allowing us to sort out fact from fiction on our own like adults) is because the answer is ugly.
As we discussed last time, the only real power in this world is the ability to control the dominant narrative about what’s going on. The only reason government works the way it works, money operates the way it operates, and authority rests where it rests is because everyone has agreed to pretend that that’s how things are. (or should be.) In actuality, government, money and authority are all man-made conceptual constructs and the collective can choose to change them whenever it wants. The only reason this hasn’t happened in our deeply dysfunctional society yet is because the plutocrats who rule us have been successful in controlling the narrative.
Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. This has always been the case. In many societies throughout history a guy who made alliances with the biggest, baddest group of armed thugs could take control of the narrative by killing people until the dominant narrative was switched to “That guy is our leader now; whatever he says goes.” In modern western society, the real leaders are less obvious, and the narrative is controlled by propaganda.
Propaganda is what keeps Americans accepting things like the fake two-party system, growing wealth inequality, medicine money being spent on bombs to be dropped on strangers in stupid immoral wars, and a government which simultaneously creates steadily increasing secrecy privileges for itself and steadily decreasing privacy rights for its citizenry. It’s also what keeps people accepting that a dollar is worth what it’s worth, that personal property works the way it works, that the people on Capitol Hill write the rules, and that you need to behave a certain way around a police officer or he can legally kill you.
And therein lies the answer to the question. You are not being protected from “disinformation” by a compassionate government who is deeply troubled to see you believing erroneous beliefs, you are being herded back toward the official narrative by a power establishment which understands that losing control of the narrative means losing power. It has nothing to do with Russia, and it has nothing to do with truth. It’s about power, and the unexpected trouble that existing power structures are having dealing with the public’s newfound ability to network and share information about what is going on in the world.
Please, please, please do read this - the tip of a very sinister iceberg. I intend to write about it myself including the incredibly defensive, rude reaction of Jimmy Wales and @wikimediauk when "Philip Cross" is raised, and the bigging up of MSM figures. https://t.co/stR3wa8TQZ
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 17, 2018
Until recently I haven’t been closely following the controversy between Wikipedia and popular anti-imperialist activists like John Pilger, George Galloway, Craig Murray, Neil Clark, Media Lens, Tim Hayward and Piers Robinson. Wikipedia has always been biased in favor of mainstream CNN/CIA narratives, but until recently I hadn’t seen much evidence that this was due to anything other than the fact that Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project and most people believe establishment-friendly narratives. That all changed when I read this article by Craig Murray, which is primarily what I’m interested in directing people’s attention to here.
The article, and this one which prompted it by Five Filters, are definitely worth reading in their entirety, because their contents are jaw-dropping. In short there is an account which has been making edits to Wikipedia entries for many years called Philip Cross. In the last five years this account’s operator has not taken a single day off–no weekends, holidays, nothing–and according to their time log they work extremely long hours adhering to a very strict, clockwork schedule of edits throughout the day as an ostensibly unpaid volunteer.
This is bizarre enough, but the fact that this account is undeniably focusing with malicious intent on anti-imperialist activists who question establishment narratives and the fact that its behavior is being aggressively defended by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales means that there’s some serious fuckery afoot.
“Philip Cross”, whoever or whatever that is, is absolutely head-over-heels for depraved Blairite war whore Oliver Kamm, whom Cross mentioned as a voice of authority no fewer than twelve times in an entry about the media analysis duo known collectively as Media Lens. Cross harbors a special hatred for British politician and broadcaster George Galloway, who opposed the Iraq invasion as aggressively as Oliver Kamm cheered for it, and on whose Wikipedia entry Cross has made an astonishing 1,800 edits.
Updated: The Philip Cross Affair - UPDATE "Philip Cross" has not had one single day off from editing Wikipedia in almost five years. "He" has edited every single day from 29 August 2013 to 14 May 2018. Including five Christmas Days. That's 1,721 https://t.co/z5NRExlLon
— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) May 19, 2018
Despite the overwhelming evidence of constant malicious editing, as well as outright admissions of bias by the Twitter account linked to Philip Cross, Jimmy Wales has been extremely and conspicuously defensive of the account’s legitimacy while ignoring evidence provided to him.
“Or, just maybe, you’re wrong,” Wales said to a Twitter user inquiring about the controversy the other day. “Show me the diffs or any evidence of any kind. The whole claim appears so far to be completely ludicrous.”
“Riiiiight,” said the totally not-triggered Wales in another response. “You are really very very far from the facts of reality here. You might start with even one tiny shred of some kind of evidence, rather than just making up allegations out of thin air. But you won’t because… trolling.”
“You clearly have very very little idea how it works,” Wales tweeted in another response. “If your worldview is shaped by idiotic conspiracy sites, you will have a hard time grasping reality.”
As outlined in the articles by Murray and Five Filters, the evidence is there in abundance. Five Filters lays out “diffs” (editing changes) in black and white showing clear bias by the Philip Cross account, a very slanted perspective is clearly and undeniably documented, and yet Wales denies and aggressively ridicules any suggestion that something shady could be afoot. This likely means that Wales is in on whatever game the Philip Cross account is playing. Which means the entire site is likely involved in some sort of psyop by a party which stands to benefit from keeping the dominant narrative slanted in a pro-establishment direction.
A 2016 Pew Research Center report found that Wikipedia was getting some 18 billion page views per month. Billion with a ‘b’. Youtube recently announced that it’s going to be showing text from Wikipedia articles on videos about conspiracy theories to help “curb fake news”. Plainly the site is extremely important in the battle for control of the narrative about what’s going on in the world. Plainly its leadership fights on one side of that battle, which happens to be the side that favors western oligarchs and intelligence agencies.
How many other “Philip Cross”-like accounts are there on Wikipedia? Has the site always functioned an establishment psyop designed to manipulate public perception of existing power structures, or did that start later? I don’t know. Right now all I know is that an agenda very beneficial to the intelligence agencies, war profiteers and plutocrats of the western empire is clearly and undeniably being advanced on the site, and its founder is telling us it’s nothing. He is lying. Watch him closely.
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Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing my daily articles is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
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Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Appendix
Given the fact that pages can disappear without trace these days, below we have reproduced the contents of fivefilters.org’s expose of the entity known as “Philip Cross” (we don’t know if it is human, and if so, one or many, or if it is a robot, controlled by some specialists, all working to advance the western plutocratic narrative while cancelling and neutralising counter-narratives, we have reproduced that page below. Click on the orange button to examine it. Better still, copy it, download it, print it.
[bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ expand_text=”Time to ditch Wikipedia” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]
Time to ditch Wikipedia? A look at a Wikipedia editor’s long-running campaign to discredit anti-war campaigners and journalists
A Wikipedia editor called Philip Cross (Andrew Philip Cross and later “Julian” on Twitter) has a long record of editing the entries of many anti-war figures on the site to include mostly critical commentary while removing positive information contributed by others. At time of writing he is number 308 in the list of Wikipedians by number of edits.
Wikipedia entries very often appear first in search results, and so for many will be the first and only port of call when researching something. People unaware of the political nature of the editing that goes on on the site, in this case supposedly by a single, dedicated editor, are being seriously misled.
As an active editor for almost 15 years, Cross is very familiar with some of the more arcane Wikipedia rules and guidelines (along with their obscure acronyms) and uses them to justify removing information he dislikes in favour of his own inclusions. Often in a very subtle manner and over a long period of time. Anyone familiar with the work of the people he targets will recognise how one-sided and distorted those entries become.
Cross is, however, much nicer to the entries of people he likes. Former hedge-fund manager and Iraq war supporter Oliver Kamm, and right-wing author Melanie Phillips, both columnists for The Times, are two examples.
On Twitter, where Cross is more provocative and antagonistic, he doesn’t hide the fact that he has long-running feuds with many of his targets on Wikipedia.
After George Galloway, Media Lens is his second most edited article on the site. Cross is responsible for almost 80% of all content on the Media Lens entry.
Cross calls his Wikipedia targets ‘goons’. The list includes anti-war politician George Galloway former MP Matthew Gordon-Banks, historian, human rights activist and former UK ambassador Craig Murray, investigative journalist Dr Nafeez Ahmed, Edinburgh University professor Tim Hayward, Sheffield University professor Piers Robinson, and media analysis group Media Lens.
And he’s happy to openly taunt his Wikipedia targets on Twitter:
How this behaviour doesn’t fall foul of Wikipedia’s rules, we don’t know. Especially as his efforts, in addition to misleading the public, have serious consequences for the people targeted.
Cross’ activities are now finally getting some attention thanks to more of his targets speaking out on Twitter. The story has now also been picked up by RT and the Sunday Herald.
Ron McKay writes in the Sunday Herald:
Within the cyber cloisters of academe Wikiwars are raging, with one Edinburgh professor in particular catching the flak. Tim Hayward is one of the group of academics (his colleague Paul McKeigue is another) who set up the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media – or if you prefer the Times description, Apologists for Assad. The group’s questioning over whether it could be definitively concluded that the Syrian regime was responsible for the Ghouta chemical attack last month (they have also queried the Novichok attack of the Skripals) is apparently what provoked their pillorying in the Thunderer.
Within hours Hayward’s Wikipedia had been strafed and apparently favourable references removed. Former ambassador Craig Murray is another who claims to have come under “obsessive attack” with his page subject to 107 detrimental changes over three days. The journalist Neil Clark has a similar story about amendments and alterations.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that there are common threads here. All of those are – (select your own description, anti-war, assiduous, useful idiots?) – prominent campaigners on social media and in the mainstream media vigorously questioning our foreign policy. All have also clashed with Oliver Kamm, a former hedge-fund manager and now Times leader writer and columnist.
The RT piece opens with:
A mystery online figure called Philip Cross is targeting anti-war and non-mainstream UK figures by prolifically editing their Wikipedia pages – to the point that George Galloway is offering a reward to see him unmasked.
Active on Wikipedia since 2004, Philip Cross has been editing wiki entries for nearly 15 years. Recently, trouble has been brewing online, with Cross accused of paying special attention to a cluster of Wikipedia accounts, editing them or deleting chunks of information.
Pundits like Galloway, academic Tim Hayward, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, and ex-UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray have fallen in the crosshairs of the editorial mystery man (or perhaps woman) who goes by the name of Philip Cross – and many of them are growing frustrated with the lack of action from Wikipedia to prevent malicious editing.
See also this Sputnik interview with George Galloway. Galloway’s Wikipedia entry is Cross’ most edited page on the site with 1,796 edits.
So far none of this has resulted in any action from Wikipedia, only dismissals from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder.
Wikipedia diffs
Considering Cross’ quite open hostility towards the people whose pages he edits on Wikipedia, it should already be apparent that he should not be editing those pages at all. Those demanding diffs (exact changes made in an edit) are really missing the bigger picture here.
But let’s take a look at just a few of Cross’ recent edits. His edit history goes back many years, so this will only be a tiny sample. We encourage those targeted by Cross to send links to edits made to their pages so we can try to highlight them here. Each of the images here shows, on the left, a section of a Wikipedia entry before Cross’ edit, and to its right, what Cross changes it to.
Cross doesn’t like Sheffield University professor Piers Robinson.
So, he edits his Wikipedia entry and removes the fact that Robinson has written for the The Guardian…
…and throws in an unsourced claim about journalist Eva Bartlett (someone else he doesn’t like) and then tries to make a tenuous, defamatory connection between Robinson and another one of his targets (journalist Vanessa Beeley).
Cross likes Iraq war supporter, former hedge-fund manager and Times columnist Oliver Kamm.
So he removes completely the fact that there’s an upcoming court case brought against Kamm by journalist Neil Clark for harassment and defamation:
Oliver Kamm is notable when examining Cross’ edits, because, although Kamm himself is not a very significant figure, he appears to be one of Cross’ favourite people.
Craig Murray observed what happened to his Wikipedia entry when he criticised Kamm:
On 7 February I published an article calling out Kamm for publishing a blatant and deliberate lie about me. The very next day, 8 February, my Wikipedia page came under obsessive attack from somebody called Philip Cross who made an astonishing 107 changes over the course of the next three days. Many were very minor, but the overall effect was undoubtedly derogatory. He even removed my photo on the extraordinary grounds that it was “not typical” of me.
Media Lens also make an important point on Twitter:
The word ‘Kamm’ appears in the @Wikipedia entry for Media Lens twelve times. ‘Media Lens’ appears in Oliver Kamm’s entry….zero times. Just one reason why @jimmy_wales‘s focus on ‘diffs’ as evidence of bad faith is misplaced.
Cross likes right-wing Times columnist Melanie Phillips.
So why should anyone have to learn about Phillips’ climate change denial? Cross removed the section wholesale.
Cross doesn’t like media analysis group Media Lens.
So he removes something nice former BBC editor Peter Barron wrote about them…
…and changes it to:
Peter Barron, the former editor of the BBC’s ”Newsnight” commented in November 2005 that although Cromwell and Edwards “are unfailingly polite”, he had received “hundreds of e-mails from sometimes less-than-polite hommes engages – they’re almost always men – most of whom don’t appear to have watched the programme” as a result of complaints instigated by Media Lens.
And then, as with many of his other targets, he adds in vacuous complaints from people who prefer to insult and smear rather than engage with substance:
Despite Cross’ hostility toward Media Lens and a self-confessed “long standing feud”, he is, remarkably, responsible for the majority (77.8%) of the content on the Media Lens Wikipedia entry:
Click the image to expand it (made with WhoColor).
Occasionally, it seems, Cross does get caught out. His recent effort to write the entry for Edinburgh University professor Tim Hayward resulted in another editor reverting the change with the note:
this is all completely overheated; if it’s all he is known for, we’re headed for BLP1E [Biographies of living persons#Subjects notable only for one event]; if it is to be included, it will be worded responsibly and added via consensus
Cross attempted again to get his edit in, and was rebuked again:
you’re not even trying via a talk-page discussion
Wikipedia usage
Cross is listed number 308 in the list of Wikipedians by number of edits. (We’re linking to an archived copy here because Cross requested his name be removed from the list after his edits started to get more attention on Twitter.)
He is very active on Wikipedia, as his time card shows.
As should be clear by now, this is not a project that Cross takes lightly. He devotes considerable time to it: many hours every day and with the same intensity on weekends as on weekdays.
We pulled in the dates from his user contributions page and found that Cross had not had a single day off from editing the site in almost 5 years! (Consecutive edit dates between 29 August 2013 and 14 May 2018.) You’d have more free time to spend on leisure activities pursuing a regular full-time job than Cross has editing Wikipedia.
Craig Murray writes in his piece The Philip Cross Affair:
The operation runs like clockwork, seven days a week, every waking hour, without significant variation. If Philip Cross genuinely is an individual, there is no denying he is morbidly obsessed. I am no psychiatrist, but to my entirely inexpert eyes this looks like the behaviour of a deranged psychotic with no regular social activities outside the home, no job (or an incredibly tolerant boss), living his life through a screen. I run what is arguably the most widely read single person political blog in the UK, and I do not spend nearly as much time on the internet as “Philip Cross”. My “timecard” would show where I watch football on Saturdays, go drinking on Fridays, go to the supermarket and for a walk or out with the family on Sundays, and generally relax much more and read books in the evenings. Cross does not have the patterns of activity of a normal and properly rounded human being.
Wikipedia sees no problem with all this
Wikipedia user KalHolmann tried to alert Wikipedia admins to some of these problems, but his request to prevent Cross from editing was quickly shut down with the following response:
Zero evidence of COI [Conflict of Interest]. Galloway has picked a fight with Cross, not the other way around.
This despite the fact that Cross has himself has admitted a “big conflict of interest” (although that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to edit these pages).
Neil Clark points out how absurd the Wikipedia response is:
‘Philip Cross’ has edited @georgegalloway ‘s wikipedia page over 1800 times. George finally responds and offers a £1000 reward for Cross’s identification and it is he who is accused of ‘picking a fight’. This takes victim-blaming to a whole new level.
Don’t trust what you read on Wikipedia!
Please spread the word to anyone who’s unaware of the extent to which Wikipedia can be manipulated in this way.
Email a friend – Share on Facebook – Tweet about it
And if you’d like to see some action taken by Wikipedia, please tweet Jimmy Wales and let him know.
More information
- See stats on Cross’ Wikipedia activity
- See list of Philip Cross’ Wikipedia contributions
- Follow leftworks, Neil Clark, George Galloway, Media Lens, Tim Hayward, Piers Robinson, Craig Murray
Contact
If you’d like to get in touch about anything here, please email fivefilters@fivefilters.org or tweet us @fivefilters.
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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report