Tag: propaganda

Corporate media spreads hoax that Russian cosmonauts wore yellow suits to ‘support Ukraine’

When photos began to circulate online of Russian cosmonauts boarding the International Space Station (ISS), media outlets online quickly spread the hoax that the group had deliberately chosen to wear yellow and blue flight suits in solidarity with Ukraine by wearing the country’s national colors.

The connection between the color of the attire and the conflict in Ukraine spread to outlets like the BBC, Bloomberg Quicktake, The Times, and NPR.

But what many had hoped was an act of heroic defiance against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime turned out to be an unrelated coincidence.  

Veteran cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, the mission commander for the Russian team aboard the ISS, quickly debunked the story, Reuters reported. In a news conference from the space station, he said the suits had been created six months ago, predating Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine. Moreover, Artemyev expressed solidarity with his country, voicing no sympathy for Ukraine.

“Color is just color,” Artemyev said. “It has nothing to do with Ukraine. In these days, even though we are in space, we are together with our president and people!”

He explained that the team had selected its colors based off of the team’s common alma mater—a college whose primary colors also used yellow and blue. “Every crew picks a color that looks different. It was our turn to pick a color,” he said.

“Sometimes yellow is just yellow,” Roscosmos’s press service said on its Telegram channel. “To see the Ukrainian flag everywhere and in everything is crazy.”

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People Overestimate The US War Machine And Underestimate The US Propaganda Machine

The European Endowment for Democracy is a spinoff of the US government-funded “NGO” National Endowment for Democracy, which according to its own co-founder was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely orchestrate coups and manage narratives to advance US interests. A page on an NED website says that “All EU member states are members of EED’s Board of Governors, together with members of the European Parliament and civil society experts.”

So this is a media outlet funded by a government-run “NGO” being forcefully pushed in front of millions of western eyeballs by a major Silicon Valley corporation that people have come to rely on for getting information about the world. In the same way Silicon Valley facilitates government censorship by proxy, it also facilitates government propaganda by proxy.

The Globe and Mail reports that the Canadian government also put $200,000 toward Kyiv Independent’s funding. The outlet is being so loudly amplified by Twitter that not only has its Twitter account secured nearly two million followers since its creation in November, but one of its reporters (who calls the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion his “brothers in arms“) has gained a million followers since the start of the Russian invasion.

Do you see how sophisticated just that one tiny component of the US-centralized empire‘s propaganda campaign is? How many seemingly disparate and unrelated elements it has? Multiple countries, NGOs, an ostensibly independent social media platform, an ostensibly independent news outlet. It’s very difficult to see how any of it connects at all if you don’t know where to look. And almost nobody knows where to look.

This highly advanced perception management operation is happening all around the world about any issue the empire has a vested interest in. As anti-imperialist author and podcaster Justin Podur recently put it, “The US Empire is based on the mastery of storytelling. Making reality through propaganda.”

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Orwell Was Right

The ideal citizen of Orwell’s Oceania bubbled with rage a mile wide and a millimeter deep and could forget in an instant passions that may have consumed him or her for years. We just did this, with a pandemic that had the country steaming with indignation until it was quietly declared over the moment Putin rolled over Ukraine’s borders. We switched from “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” to “Putin’s price hikes” in a snap. National outrage moved a few lobes over with zero fuss, and now we hate new people; instead of “anti-vax Barbie,” we’re barring Russian and Belarussian kids from the Paralympics.

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? – 1984

A heartbeat ago politicians and pundits all over were denouncing Canadian trucker protests over reports of swastikas. “Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This was despite the fact that even Snopes concluded the photographed “swastikas” weren’t expressions of neo-Nazi sentiment, but protesters comparing Justin Trudeau’s government to Nazis.

Now the swastika in the Ukrainian context has been un-banned by Facebook, you can buy Azov Battalion mugs and t-shirts on Amazon, and we have headlines like “Are there really neo-Nazis fighting for Ukraine? Well, yes — but it’s a long story.” In an effort to argue that Putin is worse than Hitler, we have people like Atlantic Council senior fellow Anders Aslund saying “Hitler had more arguments for his attack on Poland,” and former U.S. Ambassador and Stanford professor Michael McFaul saying on live TV that Hitler “didn’t kill ethnic Germans, German-speaking people.”

This isn’t to say the Russian propaganda about “deNazifying” Ukraine should be taken seriously, but it’s amazing, isn’t it, how quickly our conventional wisdom changes its stance even toward something like neo-Nazism — an absolute one day, an Amazon impulse buy the next.

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The Press Has Lied To Drag The United States Into War Before. Don’t Think They Won’t Again

The night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sat at anchor in Havana, Cuba. A few minutes after 9 p.m., the nightly ritual of “Taps” from Fifer C. H. Newton’s bugle descended over the ship. Some half an hour later, the forward end of the ship rose suddenly above the water.

“Along the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion,” detailed author Tom Miller. “Within seconds, another eruption — this one deafening and massive — splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn’t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.”

The explosion, which killed more than 250 men on board, was quickly memorialized with cries of “Remember the Maine!” Without directly accusing Spain, which controlled Cuba at the time, a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry decided a month later that the explosion was from a mine. (A U.S. Navy investigation decades later found it was likely an accidental coal bunker fire.)

Shortly afterward, the United States declared war on Spain, starting the Spanish-American War. One of the biggest warmongering forces in America, capitalizing on the Maine‘s explosion, was the press — a position American media pundits continue to hold as they work overtime to drag Americans into a war with Russia over Ukraine.

When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the “Ghost of Kyiv” to that Snake Island story to old photos taken years ago, you should be asking why the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it censors conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less). It wouldn’t be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war.

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How Truth was Destroyed So Americans Would Crave Propaganda

One of the most vital fundamentals in understanding how the ruling elite / predator class facilitate their agendas is the role of controlled media to create perception. Perception is, in essence, reality. What is perceived is usually widely believed.

For example, the notion that the sky is blue. Scientifically speaking it actually is not, we only perceive it as blue due to the refraction of light waves through earth’s atmosphere and into the retina of the eye. Ask anyone without an understanding of this scientifically fundamental fact and they will undoubtedly espouse that the sky is indeed blue — as that is the “reality” created by their perception. This is a harmless false perception, but others are not so.

The same is true for the illusionary reality versus objective reality. An empirical observation of how the world really works as opposed to a manufactured perception based on incomplete or inaccurate information represented as authoritative and propagated in repetition.

Unfortunately however in our ever increasingly polarized society it is the manufactured perception that is espoused most fervently. In some cases those who choose to ignore facts in favor of narrative, echo chambers, and tribalism, live in a somewhat alternate reality, albeit a willfully ignorant one.

A control paradigm plays a crucial part in this. And as this report will demonstrate, the current incarnation of US news media, by way of deliberate obfuscation facilitates this paradigm by default.

One stark example of this would be manufactured outrage. Manufactured outrage is a term to describe the intentional misrepresentation of events with the aim of invoking a furious reaction from one or more groups of people. Intentionally praying on the emotional vulnerability of the human condition, typically in the form of gaslighting. Done so in a way that those galvanizing the reaction would find beneficial to their own aims.

Manufactured outrage is a tactic used frequently by the media, typically as a tool of controlled opposition used within identity politics to maintain division.

As this article exemplifies the multiple facets in which the media has been co-opted for use towards these manipulative agendas, the context for the use of manufactured outrage will become clear.

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We’re Moving Into More Dangerous Mob Mentality

We’ve seen with BLM, COVID, and other topics how the narrative can get out of control and squash the people who question or counter it. We saw, in Canada, to what lengths the government would go to crush peaceful protest — not by legitimately arresting people who might be blocking a street — but by doing things like freezing people’s bank accounts without due process of law and blocking GoFundMe accounts to crush the protest.

We’re seeing something like that bubble up again when it comes to the situation with Russia and Ukraine. Sanctions on the government of Russia — or oligarchs who prop it up — make a lot of sense. But discriminating against all Russians and all things Russian because you think that somehow virtue signals that you care is madness. That shouldn’t need to be said. But, it does, because that’s exactly what some are doing. It’s a crushing of people who the narrative deems “wrong”– in this case, for the “crime” of being Russian.

Alexander Malofeev is a 20-year-old piano prodigy. He isn’t an oligarch and he isn’t a friend of Vladimir Putin. He’s just a guy who had piano performances scheduled with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra over the past few days. But they were canceled. Not because he supported the war — he was against the invasion and he said so. He even has family members in Ukraine. But because he happened to be Russian.

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