Tag: propaganda

Western Civilization Is Being Organized Around Winning US Infowars

The US-centralized empire’s use of propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation is the single most urgent issue of our time, because it’s what prevents attention from being drawn to all other issues. And all signs indicate it’s set to get much, much worse.

I feel the need to reiterate once again that the censorship we’re seeing about Ukraine is of a whole new kind than anything we’ve seen before. There’s no pretense that it’s done to save lives or protect democracy this time around, it’s just “We need to control the thoughts that people think about this war.”

Once it was accepted that disinformation and misinformation must be curtailed from above, government and tech institutions took that as license to decide what’s true and false on our behalf. We know this because now they’re just openly propagandizing and censoring us about a war.

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71 years of RFE/RL: How the CIA-founded American state run media outlet survived the Soviet collapse to fight Cold War 2.0

The first of May marks the 51st anniversary of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (hereinafter “RFE/RL”, although this didn’t become the official name until 1976) – radio stations which broadcast into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, respectively. As detailed in an internal CIA document from 1951 titled “Radio Aims and Objectives,” RFE/RL was to be operated by refugees or exiles from the various Socialist Bloc countries to broadcast information intended to encourage “hatred against the regime(s)” and to increase the “will to resist the regime(s).” In other words, this project had an explicit function to remove governments unfavorable to Washington.

Undoubtedly, May 1 was chosen as the launch of this project as it coincided with International Workers’ Day, one of the most important holidays in the Socialist Bloc. 

From its inception until 1972, it was the CIA which funded RFE/RL, though it did so covertly without congressional knowledge or authorization. And it was CIA Director Allen Dulles – the mastermind behind the overthrow of democratic governments in countries such as Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) – who greenlit the secret financing of RFE/RL in the hope that it would contribute to the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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Tulsi Gabbard Points Out What the US Now Has in Common with Dictatorships

Those on the right aren’t the only ones criticizing the Biden administration’s new Disinformation Governance Board. Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard pointed out on Fox News’s “Hannity” that such an apparatus is a hallmark of dictatorships around the world.  

“This is the kind of thing that you see in dictatorships, this ministry of truth, this department of propaganda that the Biden administration has just stood up. And the reason why you see this in dictatorships is because they are afraid of us—they are afraid of the people,” she explained. “They are afraid that we might actually think for ourselves.”

The Hawaii Democrat said the DGB will carry out two functions. 

“No. 1, they will use taxpayer dollars to work through the mainstream media and flood the airwaves with whatever their propaganda narrative is that they are pushing at any given time and try to drown out anyone with alternate views,” she said. “And No. 2, they will silence dissenting voices through intimidation.”

The tactics are not new, Gabbard explained. 

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How Ukraine’s ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ legendary pilot was born

Ukraine’s fighter pilots are vastly outnumbered by the Russians, and have become legendary – thanks in part to the story of an alleged flying ace called the “Ghost of Kyiv”.

This hero is said to have downed as many as 40 enemy planes – an incredible feat in an arena where Russia controls the skies.

But now the Ukraine Air Force Command has warned on Facebook that the “Ghost of Kyiv is a superhero-legend whose character was created by Ukrainians!”.

“We ask the Ukrainian community not to neglect the basic rules of information hygiene,” the message said, urging people to “check the sources of information, before spreading it”.

Earlier reports had named the ace as Major Stepan Tarabalka, 29. The authorities confirmed that he was killed in combat on 13 March and honoured with a Hero of Ukraine medal posthumously.

Now, the air force stresses that “Tarabalka is not ‘Ghost of Kiev’, and he did not hit 40 planes”.

It describes the “Ghost of Kyiv” as “a collective image of pilots of the Air Force’s 40th tactical aviation brigade, who defend the sky over the capital”, rather than a single man’s combat record.

For weeks, Ukrainians did not have a name to go with the “Ghost of Kyiv” – but that did not stop the story going viral on social media.

It was used as a marketing brand by a Ukrainian model aircraft manufacturer, while Ukrainian Iryna Kostyrenko showed off a military badge inspired by the legend.

And the defence ministry tweeted a video celebrating Tarabalka’s heroism.

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Everyone’s Anti-War Until The War Propaganda Starts

Everyone’s anti-war until the war propaganda starts. Nobody thinks of themselves as a warmonger, but then the spin machine gets going and before you know it they’re spouting the slogans they’ve been programmed to spout and waving the flags the flags they’ve been programmed to wave and consenting to whatever the imperial war machine wants in that moment.

Virtually everyone will tell you they love peace and hate war when asked; war is the very worst thing in the world, and no healthy person relishes the thought of it. But when the rubber meets the road and it’s time to oppose war and push for peace, those who’d previously proclaimed themselves “anti-war” are on the other side screaming for more weapons to be poured into a proxy war that their government deliberately provoked.

This is because the theory of being anti-war is very different from the practice. In theory people are just opposed to the idea of exploding other people for no good reason. In practice they’re always hit with a very intense barrage of media messaging giving them what look like very good reasons why those people need exploding.

Being truly anti-war isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like people picture in their imaginations. It looks like getting smashed with a deluge of information designed to manipulate and confuse and working through it while getting screamed at by those who’ve fallen for the brainwashing. It’s not cute. It’s not fun. It’s not the feel-good flower power time that people intuit it is when they look at the part of themselves that seeks peace. It’s standing up against the most sophisticated propaganda machine that has ever existed while being offered every reason not to.

When people think of themselves as “anti-war”, they’re usually imagining themselves as anti- another Iraq war, or anti- some theoretical Hitler-like president starting a war because he likes killing people. They’re not picturing the reality of what being anti-war actually is in practice.

Because selling the war to the public is a built-in component of all war strategy, the war will always look necessary from the mainstream perspective, and it won’t look like those other wars which we now know in retrospect were mistakes. It’s always designed to look appealing. There’s never not going to be atrocity propaganda. There’s never not going to be reasons fed to you selling this military intervention as special and completely necessary. That will be the case every single time, because that’s how modern wars are packaged and presented.

This is why you’ll always see a number of self-described leftists and anti-imperialists cheering for the latest US war project. They are ideologically opposed to the idea of war in theory, but the way it actually shows up in practice is always different from what they pictured.

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The Psychology of Manipulation: Lessons Learned From the Master of Propaganda

Edward L. Bernays was an American business consultant who is widely recognized as the father of public relations. Bernays was one of the men responsible for “selling” World War 1 to the American public by branding it as a war that was necessary to “make the world safe for democracy”. During the 1920s, Bernays consulted for a number of major corporations, helping to boost their business through expertly crafted marketing campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion.

In 1928, Edward Bernays published his famous book, Propaganda, in which he outlined the theories behind his successful “public relations” endeavours. The book provides insights into the phenomenon of crowd psychology and outlines effective methods for manipulating people’s habits and opinions.

For a book that’s almost 100 years old, Propaganda could not be more relevant today. In fact, its relevance is a testament to the unchanging nature of human psychology.

One of the key takeaways of the book is that mind control is an important aspect of any democratic society. Indeed, Bernays maintains that without the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses”, democracy simply would not “work”.

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The Propaganda Campaign Now Complete as Liberals Embrace War, Support “Literal Nazis”

After the attacks on September 11, the United States was worked into a collective rage as millions attempted to understand why or who would carry out such an atrocious attack in America. The war hawks, who’d been waiting for their moment to strike then directed this collective rage toward anonymous brown faces in Afghanistan, using their boogeyman, Osama Bin Laden.

The majority of Americans were seething with the desire for bloodshed as they unquestioningly lapped up the narrative fed to them by their televisions. “USA! USA! USA!” was the rallying cry that would be the beginning of a multi-trillion dollar quagmire in which tens of thousands of US troops would become maimed, psychologically devastated or killed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians would die as the weapons manufacturers raked in record profits. For what?

Though most people bought the narrative that “you are either with us, or with the terrorists,” there was a small minority, many of whom were on the Left, who opposed the wars. In the early days of the war, Republican Congressman Ron Paul found more acceptance from liberals over his antiwar views than he did from inside his own party.

Though this minority was small, the antiwar Left was loud and quickly became a force to be reckoned with. 

The vocal minority would gain support over the years, helping to foster one of the largest antiwar movements since Vietnam. Their message on non-interventionism and peace was resonating throughout their ranks and bipartisan support was increasing, until one day — Barack Obama happened.

When the Left was presented with Obama — who would end up not only supporting Bush’s wars but escalating and spreading them — they had a choice to make: remain morally consistent and oppose all wars of aggression, or, enter a state of cognitive dissonance and accept the wars now that “their team” was carrying them out.

Unfortunately, this massive movement for peace then began to wane, until suddenly, the antiwar Left, had left.

War would become the policy of the very liberals who once stood against US Imperialism. For 8 years, liberals sat back and watched Obama drop tens of thousands of bombs on poor brown people on the other side of the planet. Not only did they remain silent in the face of this mass murder, they supported it.

The former resistance against US aggression abroad had been successfully redirected inward by media pundits, politicians and blowhards. Through a massive series of propaganda campaigns, the antiwar outrage was converted to woke rage.

Instead of standing against the oppression and murder of innocent people by the the US military Industrial Complex, team woke had a different agenda. They were going to fight the “literal Nazis” who were easily spotted in crowds because of the bright red hats they wore, which read “Make America Great Again.”

Children blown apart by hellfire missiles and entire cities turned to rubble by shock and awe, now took a backseat to “OrangeManBad!”

When the divide in America reached fever pitch — sometime around the riots in Charlottesville — any hope of maintaining a consistent antiwar movement had been stomped on by black boots, bike locks, and tiki-torches.

The corpse of the antiwar movement was too weak even to roll over in its grave.

Fast forward to 2022, and after two years of psychological warfare in the form of covid hysteria and legacy media fear mongering, the once-inspiring antiwar movement of the early 2000’s had been transformed into a party of deranged warmongers who think that calling for a “no-fly zone” against Russia and sending missiles to Ukraine is a “pro-peace movement.”

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How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The US Win A Propaganda War Against Putin?

Ask a properly brainwashed liberal why they support the censorship of someone who disputes US narratives about Russian war crimes in Bucha or Mariupol and they’ll probably tell you something like “Well, it’s disinformation!” or “Because it’s propaganda!” or “How much is Putin paying you??” But what they won’t be able to do is articulate exactly what specific harm is being done by such speech in the same way that they could when defending the censorship of Covid skeptics or the factions responsible for last year’s riot in the Capitol building.

The one argument you’ll get, if you really press the issue, is that the United States is in a propaganda war with Russia, and it is in our society’s interests for our media institutions to help the United States win that propaganda war. Cold wars are fought between nuclear powers because hot warfare would risk annihilating both nations, leaving only other forms of war like psychological warfare available. There’s no argument that this new escalation in censorship saves lives or protects elections, but there is an argument that it can help facilitate the long-term cold war agendas of the United States.

But what does that mean exactly? It means if we accept this argument we’re knowingly consenting to a situation where all the major news outlets, websites and apps that people look to for information about the world are geared not toward telling us true things about reality, but toward beating Vladimir Putin in some weird psywar. It means abandoning any ambitions of being a truth-based civilization that is guided by facts, and instead accepting an existence as a propaganda-based civilization geared toward making sure we all think thoughts that hurt Moscow’s long-term strategic interests.

And it’s just absolutely freakish that this is a decision that has already been made for us, without any public discussion as to whether or not that’s the kind of society we want to live in. They jumped right from “We’re censoring speech to protect you from violence and viruses” to “We’re censoring speech to help our government conduct information warfare against a foreign adversary.” Without skipping a beat.

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