n Live streaming on Nov 18, 2024 EDITOR—While the establishment media downplays the "collective Biden"s horrific decision to escalate even further the West's war against Russia, millions of people around the globe are well aware that this may indeed push the world closer to WW3, and that the population of the United States better communicate their concern to the Trump administration in unequivocal ways if humanity is to avoid a nuclear cataclysm. It's a complex situation any way we look at it, say the experts. The US ruling elites are currently fractured in their vision for the immediate strategic future. The State Department is far more willing to tempt fate with a nuclear confrontation than the Pentagon, which, surprisingly, is reluctant to risk an all out confrontation with the Eurasian powers.
In the wake of an ugly eruption of violence on the streets of Amsterdam, the media coverage of the story has been put under the microscope with editors scrambling to revise headlines, rework narratives, and reframe video content.
Contributors:
Dana Mills – Writer, Local Call and +972 Magazine
Marc Owen Jones – Associate professor, Northwestern University Qatar
James North – Editor-at-large, Mondoweiss
Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On The Line Media
On our radar: Incoming president Donald Trump has appointed Elon Musk - one of his most vocal supporters - to co-lead the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency. Meenakshi Ravi looks at Musk's new role and how he could use his influence to get favourable government treatment for his companies. The Headline Fixer Throughout Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, critics have been tearing apart the media coverage - especially by news outlets in the United States. Feature blurb: Israel's genocidal war on Gaza has shone an often-unflattering spotlight on media coverage by mainstream US news outlets. Such failings jump out at us because they often come in the form of headlines.
Historian Assal Rad explains the mission she has undertaken to "fix" misleading headlines. Featuring: Assal Rad – Author of State of Resistance: Politics, Culture and Identity in Modern Iran
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In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
People who think of either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris as decent or acceptable simply have not realized how immensely evil you have to be to become a US president.
In order to support either Harris or Trump you need to have an extreme ignorance of the murderousness and depravity of the US empire, which they both serve. Only a complete failure to see and understand the vast scale of the abusiveness of the US power structure could cause you to view these two candidates as meaningfully different from each other — let alone see one of them as decent enough to be worthy of your support.
Both Trump and Harris are auditioning for a role that will necessarily entail the creation of mountains of human corpses by US-sponsored violence, as has every viable US presidential candidate throughout our lives.
This is because the US empire is deeply evil. Not the country called the United States in and of itself, but the globe-spanning power structure which functions as an empire that’s structured around it. This vast power structure is held together by rivers of human blood, and if you’re the Democratic or Republican nominee to lead it as president then you are necessarily a deeply evil person, because you have sufficiently assured all the necessary powers that be that you will continue that bloodshed in order to become the nominee.
Most Americans (and most westerners generally) fail to truly see and understand how profoundly evil the US-centralized empire is, which is the only thing that allows all this political energy to go into pretending there are these hugely significant differences between the Democrat and the Republican presidential candidate every four years. If they could really ingest the scale of the empire’s brutality and tyranny with a deep sense of empathy for their fellow human beings upon whom it is inflicted, they would never support anyone who is pledged to help operate the slaughter machine, and they would not see any would-be operators of that machine as meaningfully different from any other. All they would see is the need for the slaughter machine to be dismantled.
Both Trump and Harris are auditioning for a role that will necessarily entail the creation of mountains of human corpses by US-sponsored violence, as has every viable US presidential candidate throughout our lives. This is because the US empire is deeply evil.
The most sophisticated propaganda engine ever created exists to prevent this understanding from taking root, in the west generally and in the United States in particular. Americans are the most propagandized population on this planet, and their propaganda indoctrination is at its most intensive during the quadrennial performance ritual known as the US presidential race. The whole thing is geared toward falsely exaggerating the differences between the two candidates while drawing emphasis away from the 99 percent of the issues on which they are indistinguishable from each other. And those 99 percent similarities happen to be on all the most murderous and tyrannical behaviors of the US government.
If Americans weren’t so aggressively propagandized and indoctrinated, this would all be obvious to them, and this election race performance wouldn’t get them clapping along like children at a puppet show. The abusive status quo necessary for maintaining the US-centralized empire would not be consented to at all, and would be forced to collapse. There’s too much power riding on preventing this from happening for Americans to be allowed to have a real say in their elections, so they are propagandized to the gills into clapping along instead.
•
Liberals are freaking out because The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post chose not to endorse a presidential candidate this election cycle, which is silly. Newspapers shouldn’t endorse political candidates. How is this not obvious to everyone?
It’s absolutely ridiculous that news outlets endorsing political candidates is a thing at all. The first job of a real journalist is to have an adversarial relationship with those in power, regardless of who wins. The only correct political position from the perspective of journalistic ethics is “If you are in power I will do everything I can to expose all your lies and misdeeds, no matter what your party or platform happens to be.” This position is vastly more important in the US, the nation with the world’s most powerful government, and becomes more important the more influence your news outlet has.
If you are campaigning for one side or the other, you’ve obviously hurt your ability to take this position. You’re communicating a line of favoritism not only to the public, but to your outlet’s staff, and to the politicians you’re meant to be holding to account. You’re making decisions which can help or hinder your outlet’s ability to gain access to an administration once in office by doing or not doing what amounts to a political favor for them. The press should not be doing political favors for any political candidate, and the expectation that they should inhibits their ability to do critical journalism.
Obviously news outlets have biases like anyone else, and they should do everything they can to bring transparency to those biases. But that should look like saying “Yes we have an ideological bias, so here’s what we’re doing to prevent that from skewing our coverage of the powerful,” not “Everybody please vote for Candidate X because we like them more than Candidate Y.”
The whole controversy is stupid. The LA Times and Washington Post shouldn’t be endorsing a presidential candidate. No news outlet should, at least if they purport to be engaged in journalism rather than political activism.
•
Back when people used to watch TV they’d complain that there’s “a hundred channels and nothing on,” and they were right: there WAS nothing on that was worth watching. Mainstream culture was just that vapid and worthless — and it still is. There’s nothing in it that fulfills us, that nourishes us in the ways we long to be nourished, that tells us real things in a real way about the world as it actually is. People would flip through TV channels disgusted at the emptiness of it all because that’s all they were being presented with: empty drivel with no edifying or transformative value.
People experience the same thing today when scrolling through their online media feeds and streaming services. They’re searching for something true and meaningful, but unless you’ve been lucky enough to stumble into a rare corner of the internet where real things are being discussed, all the algorithm feeds you is propaganda and distraction. Mindless entertainment. Celebrities. Gossip. Mainstream electoral politics. Donald Trump.
For generations we’ve been corralled toward streams of information which are designed to turn us into idiots and sociopaths. Designed to keep us from getting good information about what the powerful people who rule us are really up to. To dull our curiosity and keep us from asking useful and penetrating questions about our society. To direct any political impulses we might be able to muster in this confusing fog toward mainstream political factions which all support the status quo. To stop us from looking too closely at the death and misery our government inflicts upon people in far away countries. To keep us from noticing that we live in a mind-controlled dystopia that is fueled by endless exploitation, abuse, mass military violence, and ecocide. To keep us mindlessly turning the gears of the empire and trusting our rulers to sort things out on our behalf. To keep us sedated and compliant instead of brilliant and inconvenient.
It takes work to get outside of that matrix of manipulation. It takes time to find good sources of information and ingest what they’ve got to teach us. It takes effort to find our way into depth and meaning inside this fraudulent empire. But that’s what we all ache for. That’s what kept people flipping through channels in frustration in the glory days of television. They were looking for the depth. They were searching for something authentic. Something real.
Forming a truth-based relationship with reality can be difficult, but it’s a necessary step if you want to be an authentic person and come out of that itching sense of dissatisfaction which all controlled minds must inevitably experience. This is the only path to real and lasting happiness. Until then all you get is the fake decoy happiness they try to sell you in advertisements and Hollywood movies that comes from always getting your way and owning the right products and achieving all your goals and having a compelling personal story to tell people. This isn’t real happiness. It cannot last. It cannot satisfy.
Only truth can lead to satisfaction. And everything in this fake plastic dystopia is structured around preventing us from ever finding it.
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin Johnstoneis a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
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Propaganda and Censorship: How America Dominates Information War
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Propaganda and Censorship: How America Dominates Information War
S.L. Kanthan, a geopolitical analyst, in a column for Sputnik India uncovers American propaganda tactics and describes how the US uses media to influence global perceptions.
Recently, US media have published several articles about India, accusing the Modi government of social media censorship, influence operations, stifling critics, and running troll farms. Western organizations have also downgraded India’s freedom of press this year – with a ranking of 161 out of 180, according to the World Press Freedom Index. Interestingly, such criticisms themselves are tools of the American Empire, whose propaganda machine is so sophisticated that most people don’t even see it. Understanding how the US wages information war and maintains its soft power is very critical. Let’s dive into it.
History of American Propaganda
For more than a century, the US has understood and fine-tuned mass psychology better than anyone else. It started with Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. While Freud focused on individuals, Bernays pioneered the field of modern public relations – i.e., manufacturing consent, and manipulating the entire society. His seminal book, Propaganda starts off thus:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of," the book read.
Bernays applied his principles equally to the corporate world, politics, and wars. For example, a cigarette company, Lucky Strikes, approached him in 1929 for help in expanding their business. Bernays organized a protest by wealthy women who marched while smoking in New York City. He reframed smoking as women’s liberation, and had the media describe it as “torches of freedom.” Within days, women all across the US were gathering to smoke in public.
Bernays used his techniques to help US Presidents win election and wage wars. An illustrative example is how Bernays helped the CIA stage a coup in Guatemala in the 1950s. Much of the land in Guatemala was owned by American firms like United Fruit Company, which ruthlessly exploited the workers. Thus, when a popular and democratically elected Guatemalan leader, Jacobo Árbenz, wanted to enact land reforms and improve the conditions of his people, he was targeted by the US.
Bernays helped the CIA launch a propaganda campaign, which accused Arbenz of being a communist who colluded with the Soviet Union and threatened America’s security. This helped drum up public support in the US for a regime change operation. The CIA even launched a radio station in Guatemala to spread fake news and foment an uprising. Soon, the US invaded Guatemala and installed a brutal dictator, who banned labor unions, committed mass murder, and sold off his country to American corporations.
The Guatemalan playbook has been utilized many times in Latin America, where almost every country has been a victim of invasions or coups orchestrated by the USA. Shockingly, the USA even established the “School of Americas” to train Latin American soldiers and military generals on political oppression, police state, death squads, torture, psychological warfare, and other means to maintain totalitarian systems.
After WW2, the CIA even established ratlines for thousands of high-ranking Nazis to flee to South/Central America, where the Nazis played a key role in maintaining the Monroe Doctrine – i.e., US domination of the Western Hemisphere. An infamous Nazi in this role is Klaus Barbie – also known as the Butcher of Lyon – who established right-wing paramilitary groups such as the “Fiancés of Death” in Bolivia, staged coups to install US-friendly fascist leaders, killed “communists” who would impede profits of American corporations, and even helped the CIA with massive cocaine trafficking.
There are countless such stories in Africa and Asia as well. The US has armed, funded and supported a vast majority of dictators and fascists around the world. In an Orwellian manner, the only time a leader is guaranteed to be accused of a dictator is if he refuses to obey the diktats of the USA. Otherwise, the mainstream media ignores the sins of such leaders, who can even come to the White House for a photo op. More egregiously, the USgladly funds and arms violent militants, neo-Nazi mercenaries (like in Ukraine), Islamist jihadists, drug cartels etc. to overthrow governments around the world. Finally, the US also organizes color revolutions and soft coups to remove independent leaders and install puppet leaders.
So, the obvious question is how does the US get away with all this? More importantly, how does the US maintain its global brand as a country that fights for freedom and democracy? It is imperative that every person understand this highly sophisticated combination of capital, technology and psychology that underpins American propaganda.
Three Pillars of American Propaganda
While propaganda within a selected group or even a country is somewhat easy, global propaganda at scale requires a much bigger arsenal of diverse weapons. The three pillars of American propaganda are:
Dominanceoftools. These include traditional mediums such as newspapers, magazines, books, academics, TV, movies, music and so on. Then there are modern tools such as social media, Wikipedia, and Google Search. This virtual monopoly allows the US to flood the world with American perspectives and drown out competition. The West gets to write the history and define truth.
ConsistentMessaging. While the US media pretends to be independent, it’s an important branch of the US establishment. While the media criticize the politicians on different domestic issues, they are always in-sync with the imperialist side of the USA. During the illegal war on Iraq, the media shamelessly repeated all the lies from the US military and deep state. Perhaps 1 in 1000 mainstream media articles gently question the war propaganda of the military industrial complex. In the 1970s, the US Senate exposed Operation Mockingbird, which was the CIA’s scheme to have agents or collaborators in all the influential American media. That arrangement is still alive.
TargetedCensorship: Most people don’t see censorship in the US because the average person can go on Twitter or Facebook and post some rude things about the US or its leaders. However, what these people don’t realize is that if they are influential, they would be censored in numerous ways.
Globalists’ tyranny and censorship: EU threatens Elon Musk with fines of up to 6% of the annual revenue of not only X but ALL of Elon’s companies — like Tesla and SpaceX ! Why? For failing to tackle "illegal content and disinformation” — i.e., inconvenient truths.
Domination of mainstream narrative around the world by the US and its allies is astounding. Reuters and AP provide the foreign news to most countries, who lack the capacity to have worldwide journalists. The US also has hundreds of influential magazines and newspapers, which mold the perceptions of people on economics, geopolitics, social values, and virtually all topics. Wherever you travel, you can find CNN on TV screens at hotels and airport. In India, the #1 English TV channel is CNN.
Of course, Hollywood plays as big a role as the news media when it comes to manipulating the masses. The Pentagon and the CIA work closely with Hollywood to insert inconspicuous propaganda into movies and TV shows to portray the US as the freedom-loving hero and geopolitical rivals as bad – compare Superman, Spiderman and James Bond to the countless villains with Russian accent.
The US government and corporations – especially the military contractors – also fund numerous think tanks in the US and around the world to shape the opinions of influencers, academics, bureaucrats, and the educated class. Moreover, ruling classes from around the world send their children to study in the US/UK, thus indoctrinating the future generation with a narrow and distorted view of the world.
The US also spends a lot of money on fake NGOs that train journalists and activists, who will unsurprisingly turn out to be pro-US.
The West also controls, in indirect ways, textbooks and curriculum around the world. Whether it’s Germany or India, you will not find a high-school or college course on “American Imperialism.” A shocking example of this brainwashing is Hong Kong’s young generation, which grew up worshipping the British and never learning about the true nature of British colonialism and apartheid in Hong Kong. Sadly, these kids were also taught to hate mainland Chinese people.
Finally, all this American “wisdom” is magnified through American technology and propaganda tools such as Google Search and Wikipedia.
To summarize, the US floods the world with their propaganda through every channel possible. A person needs to be really dedicated to sift through the flood of disinformation to seek the truth. Vast majority of people don’t have the time, money or patience to go beyond the headlines, mainstream talking points, or the second page of Google Search results.
Next is consistency. Incredibly, all the channels we discussed above stick to the US establishment propaganda. This happens in a supposedly land of free speech and free press. As Noam Chomsky said, “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”
There are three more characteristics to American propaganda, which makes it very effective:
They are simple.
They are emotional.
They are repeated endlessly.
American propaganda is the same whether they are selling Nike or politicians or neoliberal economics or wars. They are summarized in catchy slogans: “Just do it” … “free market and small government” … “Make America Great Again” … “spreading freedom and democracy.”
They are also emotional. Whether the lie is about Syrian President Assad using chemical weapons or China brutally killing people in the Tiananmen Square, the narrative is so emotional that people cannot think objectively.
Propaganda is just marketing. Every good commercial has an emotional aspect to it. Thus, while marketers use sexy women to sell Coca Cola, warmongers evoke fear and/or anger to sell war. Thus, portraying Putin as taking over Europe or Xi Jinping taking over Asia are effective in creating fight-or-flight reactions. Americans have also been trained to have Pavlovian response to words such as “dictator” and “Hitler,” which are used against every leader that the US targets. Such simplistic messages are effective, because one can see people on social media mindlessly repeating them like robots.
Look at the favorable view of China in the US. It fell from 53% in 2018 to just 15% in 2023. Think about it. What has China done differently in the last five years? Nothing. All the trade wars and tech wars were started by the US, not by China.
Also, China didn’t build military bases around the US or call the US an adversary. However, suddenly everyone in the US establishment started calling China the “greatest enemy” and “biggest threat.” And people believed it.
United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that US-China ties are now on a firmer footing than a year earlier in 2023. (A huge lie). PHOTO: REUTERS
That’s the power of American propaganda. It's really stupid, emotional and childish, but works impressively to manufacture consent for wars.
Finally, the American censorship is very clever and takes on numerous forms – for example: demonetization of YouTube accounts, throttling of Twitter accounts (reducing the views), outright ban for thoughtcrimes (which has increased exponentially after the Trump phenomenon in 2016), firing people from jobs (the CEO of a tech company was recently fired for retweeting a satire article about Israel bombing Gaza) and so on.
As a personal anectdote, I got permanently banned from Medium for simply writing a factual article that questioned the outrageous U.S. allegations of Uyghur genocide by China. When the UN Human Rights group – led by Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile – went to Xinjiang and later published a report that said nothing about genocide, US politicians went berserk and attacked her viciously. Soon, she amended the report to add one line that crimes against humanity “may” have occurred. Then, she resigned.
Similarly, when the ICC wanted to look into American war crimes, the US threatened to arrest the ICC judges. Later, the US bullied the ICC to get rid of the chief judge, installed a puppet, and then indicted Russian President Putin on fake charges. The hypocrisy and duplicity are astonishing. By the way, the US did the same with the UN inspectors when they said that Iraq had no nuclear weapons two decades ago.
Julian Assange, of course, is the ultimate example of US censorship. All Wikileaks did was to publish 100% authentic documents, which exposed how the world works. However, the US empire went berserk, framed him with false rape allegations, trapped him in the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years, had the UK psychologically torture him in prison, and even tried to kill him. And he is not even an American.
“Perception is reality” is a famous American saying. When applied excessively, this principle would lead to an insane society detached from reality. And, in a way, that is exactly what is happening in the US.
Americans do not realize that they live in an oligarchic and kleptocratic system where politicians are bought and paid for by large corporations. Thus, Americans keep falling for fake elections and staged drama, even though the life of an average American has gotten worse consistently over the last five decades. Similarly, Americans keep supporting perpetual wars and a vast empire of 800 international military bases, because they naively believe the recycled war propaganda.
There is definitely more awakening in the rest of the world, especially in the Global South. People are starting to see through American propaganda and disinformation, as evidenced in the world’s recent support for Russia and Palestinians. However, more people need to wake up, especially Europeans.The next decade will be dangerous for the world, since the rulers of the US will try every imperialist trick to destroy their geopolitical competitors and prolong the American unipolar hegemony. Be prepared for intense propaganda wars.
Russophobic presstitute MSNBC Rachel Maddow has done her best to stoke the fires of enmity between two nuclear-armed superpowers. She is now a multimilionaire. It pays to sing the establishment's tune.
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Garland Nixon
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