MEDIA FRONT

KIM PETERSEN—Nowadays, the US barks that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. Then there is the allegation that China is committing genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Considering the US involvement in the oppression and killing of Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians — the notion that the US would shed a tear for Muslims is sadly risible.

Scads of disinformation have been revealed about a purported genocide of Uyghurs.

With the outrageous claims against China dismissed as flimsy artifices, the US seized upon an interpersonal altercation: an alleged sexual assault of a Chinese female tennis player by a retired former high-ranking Communist Party official.

GLENN GREENWALD—Arguably the most pernicious and prolific disseminator of organized disinformation campaigns is NBC News, which includes its cable unit MSNBC. We have spent the last several months working on a mini-documentary demonstrating how most of the coordinated lies from the U.S. security state were spread by a tiny handful of pundits, three of whom — Rachel Maddow, all-but-official CIA spokesman Ken Dilanian, and former Bush/Cheney spokesperson Nicolle Wallace — work for NBC News. That report will be published shortly.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—Strategic Culture Foundation’s editorial production is based in Russia and the journal has been publishing articles by international authors for over a decade. The online journal has gained respect and readership primarily in North America for its critical and diverse coverage of geopolitics. It seems that the official move to ban SCF by the U.S. government is really aimed at shutting down independent journalism and critical thinking under the cynical guise of combating a “foreign enemy”. This has baleful echoes with the Red Scare Cold War years in the U.S.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—People who suffer conniptions over someone’s failure to adequately criticize China or any other empire-targeted nation universally embody this dynamic. They don’t criticize the US empire, or if they do they don’t do so in a way that reflects how worthy of criticism those power structures are. Washington is plainly far, far more worthy of criticism than Beijing, but those who bleat “You can criticize BOTH” are never far more critical of Washington than Beijing. Typically, they are considerably less critical.

THE SAKER—he world is headed for war and has been headed that way for quite a while now.  Several times, just at the brink, the West decided to pull back, but each time it did that, its ruling elites felt two things: first, they felt even more hatred for Russia for forcing them to back down, and, second, they interpreted the fact that no shooting war happened (yet) as evidence, at least in their minds, that standing on the brink of war is a pretty safe exercise.