Tag: propaganda

WORTHY VS. UNWORTHY VICTIMS: STUDY REVEALS MEDIA’S SELECTIVE COVERAGE OF NAVALNY AND LIRA

Anew MintPress News study of media coverage of the deaths of American journalist and commentator Gonzalo Lira and Russian political leader Alexey Navalny has found that the establishment U.S. press overwhelmingly ignored the former and focussed on the latter. The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News and CNN collectively ran 731 segments on Navalny between February 16 and February 22, compared to just one on Lira since his death on January 12, perhaps because one was a Western-backed figure who died at the hands of an official enemy state, while the other was a pro-Russian voice who met their end at the hands of the Ukrainian government.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK COVERAGE VS RADIO SILENCE

MintPress conducted a quantitative analysis of the media coverage of two political figures who recently died in prison: Alexey Navalny and Gonzalo Lira. Both were controversial characters and critics of the governments that imprisoned them. Both died under suspicious circumstances (their families both maintain they were effectively murdered). And both died in the past six weeks, Navalny in February and Lira in January. A crucial difference in their stories, however, is that Navalny perished in an Arctic penal colony after being arrested in Russia (an enemy state), while Lira’s life ended in a Ukrainian prison, abandoned by the pro-Kiev government in Washington, D.C.

The study compared the coverage of Navalny and Lira’s death in five leading outlets: the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News, Fox News, and CNN. These outlets were chosen for their reach and influence and, together, could be said to reasonably represent the corporate media spectrum as a whole. The data was compiled using the Dow Jones Factiva news database and searches on the websites of the news organizations. This study takes no position on the matter of Navalny, Lira, or the Russia-Ukraine war.

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Ukraine’s Top Spy Chief Says Navalny Died From Blood Clot, Rejects ‘Murder’ Narrative

In a very unexpected plot twist, Ukraine appears to be in agreement with the Kremlin on Alexei Navalny’s death inside a far northern Russian prison which occurred on Feb. 16 and was listed by Russian authorities as officially due to “natural causes”. The dominant Western narrative has thus far been that Putin had him “murdered”. 

Yet now Kiev sources are saying that the anti-Putin activist supported by the West died of a blood clot. Surprisingly, this explanation is being advanced among Ukraine media sources after none other than Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR), bluntly stated it to a group of journalists on Sunday. “I may disappoint you, but as far as we know, he indeed died as a result of a blood clot. And this has been more or less confirmed,” Budanov stated.

“This wasn’t sourced from the internet, but, unfortunately, natural [causes],” he added in the remarks which were also caught on video. The spy chief’s words were also picked up in The Daily Mail, though predictably US mainstream outlets have been slow to acknowledge the assessment.

Further, the NATO-friendly pundit Anton Gerashchenko, who also served as former Ukrainian Advisor to Internal Affairs Minister, has said the following:

Vladimir Osechkin, founder of Gulagu. Net, says that, according to his sources, Navalny was killed (finished off with a blow to the chest) after being tortured with frost.

Head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov said that according to his sources, “it was a blood clot.”

Over the weekend Navalny’s mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, said her son’s body was finally released to the family. She has said Russian officials are seeking to pressure the family into doing a ‘secret funeral’ so as not to attract public demonstrations. “We do not know if the authorities will interfere to carry it out as the family wants and as Alexey deserves,” she said previously.

Navalny’s wife has laid ultimate blame on Putin for his death, while President Biden too and other Western leaders have said “Putin is responsible.”

“What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality,” Biden had said immediately after Navalny’s death was announced by Russian prison services. Some European leaders quickly branded Putin’s government a “rogue regime” as a result, urging that Moscow “must be held accountable”. The whole situation seems akin to the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, where there was a rush to blame Moscow, but allegation which were later quieted and walked back.

Meanwhile, Russia hawks in the US are urging the administration to go beyond last Friday’s large round of new anti-Moscow sanctions…

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Biden and US media lies about Ukraine are reminiscent of Vietnam War

The American Conservative published an article that parallels the Vietnam War, considered the greatest military humiliation in US history, with what they point out is a campaign of deception carried out by the current US Government, which will lead to a defeat for Kiev and NATO.

According to the author James W. Carden, who served as an advisor on US-Russian affairs at the State Department during the Obama administration, the media campaign regarding Ukraine carried out by the White House was a copy of the actions of successive US governments in Vietnam until the Nixon administration withdrew troops and concluded the intervention in 1973. He relates the Vietnam War with the lies with which President Joe Biden and his collaborators have tried to deceive citizens about the progress of the Ukraine conflict and its origin, among other issues.

These false narratives, the article notes, have been put in place and presented to Americans with the help of the “most dutiful accomplices,” such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, media outlets that, until recent times, published the triumphalist comments of Biden and his administration without any type of questioning, in addition to analysis columns where Russian President Vladimir Putin was demonised and falsely stated that Ukraine was on its way to victory.

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Alexei Navalny’s Death and Curious Well-Timed Coincidences

There is propaganda by commission and propaganda by omission, the former often serve to conceal the latter. Timing is crucial.

That the U.S. President Joseph Biden, his British, NATO, Israeli allies, and their corporate media mouthpieces are in need of a major propaganda victory is obvious. They are losing the war in Ukraine, have been condemned throughout the world for the genocide in Gaza, and are ruling over a disintegrating empire. Biden and Netanyahu’s political lives are at serious risk. And so they have just rolled out a full-court propaganda press effort aimed at covering their losses. It should be crystal clear to anyone who can use logic to see the timing involved.

The great French scholar of propaganda and technology, Jacques Ellul, wrote years ago that propaganda “is not the touch of a magic wand. It is based on slow constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition.”

However, once this groundwork has been laid over time – as it has been with the continuous anti-Russia Putin hysteria and support for Israel’s Zionist policies – it can be intensely ratcheted up in exigent circumstances when the long-serving narrative is in jeopardy, such as it is now.

Once the death in a Russian prison of the Western backed Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was announced on Friday, February 16, 2024, it was immediately followed by a cascade of anti-Russia pronouncements whose aim was to not only continue the demonization of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin but to serve other purposes as well.

With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.

Shortly after, Zelensky, performing his puppet routine while coincidently appearing at the Munich Security Conference – on Saturday, February 17, a day after Navalny’s death was announced – with Navalny’s then widow, said it was “obvious” that Putin had killed Navalny, while Biden pushed for more money for Ukraine’s doomed war against Russia, a U.S./NATO war created by the U.S. from the start with its aggressive military push to Russia’s borders and its 2015 Ukrainian coup d’état that ousted the pro-Russian leader, setting the stage for Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in February 2022. That Putin told Carlson these obvious facts, while slyly mentioning to Carlson that he understood that Carlson once tried to join the CIA, is now for most people in the West history lost behind the headlines, if it ever were anything more.

All this happened while Russia pushed through Ukraine’s defenses and took the city of Avdeevka, which had long been contested. With each day that passes, it is obvious that Biden’s Ukraine war strategy is that of a desperate politician on the ropes and that Putin has completely outfoxed the American desperados and their NATO European stooges. The MSM prefer to suggest otherwise, that hope is just around the corner if we send billions more dollars and weapons, and if with the help of our British friends, we take the war further into Russian territory and risk a nuclear confrontation. But we are in a propaganda war for the minds of the Western public.

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FLASHBACK: Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

Perhaps your real life is so rich you don’t have time for another.

Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.

“SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP),” the paper reads, so that military leaders can “develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners”.

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

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FLASHBACK: Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace

Conventional military dominance is still critical to the superpower status of the United States. But even in a military sense, it is no longer enough: if an American election can be controlled by an adversarial power, then stealth aircraft and special forces are not the answer. With lawmakers poised to authorize $160 million to counter Russian “fake news” and disinformation, and the CIA and the Congress examining meddling in the U.S. election and democracies around the world, it’s time to see weaponized narrative for what it is: a deep threat to national security.

Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It can be used tactically, as part of explicit military or geopolitical conflict; or strategically, as a way to reduce, neutralize, and defeat a civilization, state, or organization. Done well, it limits or even eliminates the need for armed force to achieve political and military aims.

The efforts to muscle into the affairs of the American presidency, Brexit, the Ukraine, the Baltics, and NATO reflect a shift to a “post-factual” political and cultural environment that is vulnerable to weaponized narrative. This begs three deeper questions:

  • How global is this phenomenon?
  • Are the underlying drivers temporary or systemic?
  • What are the implications for an American military used to technological dominance?

Far from being simply a U.S. or U.K. phenomenon, shifts to “post-factualism” can be seen in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, France, and the Philippines, among other democracies. Russia, whose own political culture is deeply post-factual and indeed post-modern, is now ably constructing ironic, highly cynical, weaponized narratives that were effective in the Ukrainian invasion, and are now destabilizing the Baltic states and the U.S. election process.

Such a large and varied shift to weaponized narrative implies that the enablers are indeed systemic. One fundamental underpinning – often overlooked – is the accelerating volume and velocity of information. Cultures, institutions, and individuals are, among many other things, information-processing mechanisms. As they become overwhelmed with information complexity, the tendency to retreat into simpler narratives becomes stronger.

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‘Russian Nuke in Space’ the October Surprise Come Early?

The big ‘national security threat’ announced today is supposedly about Russia wanting to put a nuclear weapon in space, prompting some to question whether it’s all an election year ploy.

The controversy began when House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) asked President Biden to declassify information about a “serious national security threat”.

According to ABC News, “Two sources familiar with deliberations on Capitol Hill said the intelligence has to do with the Russians wanting to put a nuclear weapon into space.”

The weapon would reportedly be designed to be used to take out satellites.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) responded by telling reporters he wanted “to assure the American people, there is no need for public alarm.”

The big, scary threat is serious business and involves a space-based nuke controlled by evil dictator Putin, but it’s also “not an immediate crisis,” according to what three members of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee have told Politico.

Okay, then. Just for election season, is it?

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AI and the new kind of propaganda

Do you remember how the unconstitutional, pastel-authoritarian and totally batshit insane “Disinformation Governance Board” – with its Mary Poppins-cosplaying, Monty Python level of unintentional self-satirizing department head – was rolled out two years ago like a half-joke, half-beta-test of a version of the 1984 Ministry of Truth?

Well, kids, I wouldn’t really call this 4D chess or anything, but of course this was just bait. This parody and its rapid withdrawal reassures us that nothing of the sort could conceivably take place, while also seeding a visible, red-herring template for how we should expect heavy-handed, overt propaganda efforts to look in this day and age.

Meanwhile, there are currently massive efforts in the background and below the surface, all across the playing field, towards implementing big data and AI technology for not only the purposes of classical, increasingly obsolete propaganda or simple surveillance. No, this time, we’re exploring entirely novel methods of behavioural modification and narrative control intended to GET OUT AHEAD of the crystallization of discourses and even the formation of identities and worldviews.

They want to control the formation and reproduction of “social imaginaries”.

So the idea is to use massive data collection and AI pattern recognition to preemptively disrupt the formation of behaviourally significant narratives, discourses or patterns of information.

With these tools of “early diagnosis” of information that potentially could disrupt the power structure and its objectives, it then becomes possible to nip it in the bud incredibly early on, way before such information has even coalesced into something like coherent narratives or meaningful models for explanation or further (precarious) conclusions.

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Propaganda Looney Tunes

Iremember my history textbooks explaining the use of cartoonish figures as propaganda during the two World Wars. Imagine, for a moment, the inspiring Rosie the Riveter and Uncle Sam contrasted against the overbearing, dull, and cartoonish displays of the fascists and communists.

I was inspired by Rosie, and at the same time, I viewed the cartoons of our enemies out of context and wondered, How could anyone be influenced by cartoonish, pastiche, caricatures?

Today, the information war of cartoonish potpourri completely overwhelms us. We are awash with memes, short-form video content, tweets, posts, reposts, likes, etc. We have all viewed this content, and when it inspires some emotional response — joy, laughter, anger, indignation, surprise — we forward it onto the next person. Virality is now an everyday feature of life.

Virality with this ease of spread is a fairly novel psychic phenomenon for the human race. So, when a novel physical pathogen came along, both the disease and the memes, cartoons, and propaganda began to spread. Confronted on both physical and psychic fronts, some incredibly bizarre and often vindictive behavior resulted. It isn’t the first time this has happened.

In China, after the communist revolution, farming was collectivized. Newly mandated agricultural practices were disruptive, and food production began to falter. One of the new mandates during the Great Leap Forward was the commencement of the Four Pests Campaign.

Rather than go back to what had worked before, or allow markets to work, the authorities settled on a seemingly sensible solution. Rats, mosquitos, flies, and sparrows — yes, the small bird — would be eliminated. With these pests eradicated, the models projected food production would exceed all of the previous levels in every metric.

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FACTS FOR PEACE: THE BILLIONAIRE-BACKED CAMPAIGN ATTACKING THE PALESTINIAN CAUSE

Aweek after Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel, the social media page Facts For Peace was created with the message, “Get the facts on Hamas, Israel, and peace in the region.”

A few days later, the page began advertising its content. “Here is Hamas’ Founding Charter in Their Own Words,” one sponsored post reads alongside video clips of Hamas leaders speaking and snapshots of the document. The page has spent more than $945,000 on Facebook ads since the war began nearly four months ago, and according to POLITICO, was the single largest pro-Israel advertiser between November 2 and December 1, spending over $450,000 on Meta ads. The ads have mainly reached male-identifying Facebook users under the age of 35 in California, Texas, New York, and Florida.

Labeled as a media/news company on Facebook, now Meta, the page’s posts and its supporters appear less concerned with accurate reporting and more involved in shaping public opinion.

In November, news website Semafor reported real-estate billionaire Barry Sternlicht launched Facts For Peace and sought $1 million in donations each from some of the world’s wealthiest individuals. “This is just one of several behind-the-scenes efforts by business tycoons — many, though not all of them Jewish — to support Israel since the attack by Hamas,” Samafor reported.

“Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community,” Sternlicht wrote in an email, seen by Semafor, soliciting contributions from Wall Street, Hollywood, and tech moguls. “We must get ahead of the narrative.”

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