I write a lot about how, in a political environment that is saturated in disinformation and propaganda, it’s important to ignore people’s words and watch their actions instead to get a clear picture of what’s really happening. You could not ask for a better illustration of this than the recent behavior of the mass media with regard to Syria.
The always excellent Moon of Alabama put out a piece yesterday detailing the immense deluge of attack editorials disguised as information that have been churned out recently about anyone who questions the establishment Syria narrative, including a single day in which no less than seven smear pieces were issued by prominent publications. Seven. In one day.
If you look at the words within these smear pieces, you will gather that there has been a sudden disturbing emergence of evil bloggers, tweeters and activists who are hell bent on deceiving you into falling in love with Bashar al-Assad and pledging allegiance to the Russian flag. If you look at what these outlets are actually doing, however, you see a very different picture indeed: an aggressive, spurious campaign to inoculate the English-speaking world against the influence of anyone who disagrees with yet another war against yet another Middle Eastern country.
And people are noticing. It’s getting too blatantly obvious, like a stranger coming up to you and talking about climate change while openly masturbating; what he is doing would eclipse interest in whatever he is saying. The frenetic publication of hit pieces against anyone who fails to fall in line with the establishment Syria narrative is fast becoming the real story here.
https://twitter.com/Partisangirl/status/987865838639185921
Many of these recent hit pieces are coming out of the UK, which is interesting given the way a BBC reporter recently admonished her interviewee for questioning the official story about the alleged Douma chemical attacks because his words could hurt the “information war” effort against Russia. If this view is widespread among British journalists (and recent headlines by the Times, the Independent and the Telegraph suggest that it may be), this means we’re looking at an environment wherein reporters aren’t even pretending it’s their job to be truthful, tell all sides of a story and hold power to account, but rather to manufacture support for escalations against Russia and undermine anyone who resists.
Today yet another mainstream smear piece has been published about Vanessa Beeley, an investigative journalist who has done extensive work on the ground in Syria, which the UK’s Huffington Post branch hilariously titled “How An Obscure British Blogger Became Russia’s Key Witness Against The White Helmets”. Its author, senior Huffpo editor Chris York, doesn’t explain how we’re meant to see an investigative journalist practicing the definition of investigative journalism on the ground in a war-torn nation as “an obscure blogger”, but he has said that he has two more such articles on the way.
Who do these people think they’re kidding? Are we truly meant to believe that people expressing skepticism about the authenticity of a “civil defense group” in a distant Middle Eastern country is suddenly the most dangerous thing in the world? Are we really meant to think it’s normal for all these mass media corporations to suddenly start ferociously attacking anyone who expresses skepticism about the military agendas of western forces that have an extensive and well-documented history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to manufacture support for military agendas? Are we really meant to believe that Syria, a nation for which the US and UK have been plotting regime change for many years, is just now in sore need of humanitarian regime change? And that anyone who says otherwise just loves Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin and dead babies?
Please. We’re being lied to, aggressively and relentlessly. And it’s backfiring on them.
SO @CNN is so scared of Youtube news channels that they R creating a fake crisis so that youtube will now fully demonetize independent news. My show goes against the Pro Syrian War narrative being uniformly pushed by Est. news, so they smear me hard. https://t.co/qCTEZ4EKko
— Jimmy Dore (@jimmy_dore) April 20, 2018
Propaganda and censorship only work if they’re invisible. Once it becomes obvious that propagandists are propagandizing, public attention moves from the material being presented to the people who are doing the presenting. And this is exactly what we are seeing with the establishment Syria narrative.
In martial arts you learn never to overextend and reach for your opponent, because leaning into striking range with your arm outstretched leaves you exposed to a devastating knockout counterstrike. Do that in a boxing match and you’ll eat an uppercut that leaves you staring into a ringside doctor’s pen light and questioning your life choices. By losing control of the Syria narrative and making such a strained effort to regain it, the establishment propaganda machine has overreached, and now we have only to point at what they’re doing to cripple their Syria warmongering.
Let’s make a lot of noise about this blatant, ham-fisted propaganda campaign. When people are looking straight at them and what they are doing, the psyops can’t take root. Turn the lights on full blast in this kabuki theater and shatter the illusion for everyone.
https://twitter.com/ChrisDYork/status/986932523346296832
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17 responses to “MSM Is Frantically Attacking Dissenting Syria Narratives, And It Looks Really Bad”
les médias mentent en effet et nous manipulent en france aussi.
la preuve est faite maintenant pour le huffington post à son tour.
à qui se fier pour des infos honnêtes?
And there is this:
Brigadier-General (Res.) Zvika Fogel interviewed on the Yoman Hashevua program of Israel’s Kan radio, 21 April 2018 (On the ongoing necessity of snipers killing anybody, including medium-sized children, who approaches a fence in the desert.)
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/04/condemned-by-their-own-words/
I sometimes wish we all had the powers of the Blue Fairy. Then all forms of lying would become impossible, because anytime anyone tried to lie to anyone else or manipulate anyone else with lies, the attempt would be plain as day. All sociopaths would be put out of business, true justice would prevail everywhere, and there’s no telling how much human evil would cease to exist.
Sad that fairy tales couldn’t be for real.
The war of words on and offline is all about propaganda now. If you don’t read it (or watch it) – you’re not affected by it.
But keep this perspective: Millions of people are surfing the news. Millions more are watching the news. NONE of these people have anything to do with outcomes, decision making, or where our money is being spent and on what.
We’re just along for the ride, come hell or high water. We can’t and don’t influence anything. Even if we ‘think’ we are.
Our complicit agreement is how we ‘participate’, ie., we refuse to rebel, giving tacit approval to everything our leaders do, at EVERY level of society. We digest the news, views, comments and opinions, and yet, we have virtually no effect on anything because we continue to absorb ‘events’ like a dry sponge. And there is no end to this super-saturation and deception.
The few who do “object” do so very passively – and it means virtually nothing, accomplishes nothing, changes nothing. So all this ether ‘debate’ about what’s what, and who’s who, and who did what and on and on is absolutely useless precisely because ‘knowing’ is a powerless activity. Knowing but failing to act is the same thing as not knowing and failing to act. Acting through mere words, on or offline is also powerless.
Subscribing to the belief that ‘speaking truth to power’ by civil acts of disobedience (protests, rallies, marches, etc.) is part of the propaganda – nothing is accomplished. You’re still complicit, still sitting on the sidelines, still changing nothing, still refusing to resist in meaningful ways.
Millions of people believe that there is nothing that they can do because they believe that only verbally objecting suffices. Or voting. Both have changed nothing. The rerun politics continues every (s)Election, and so do the bombs, the suffering, the rape and abuse of human rights, and dignity. All because we refuse to act. And because they are incredibly adept at keeping us isolated and disempowered.
If you want to ‘know what is wrong with the world’ – look in a mirror. You refused to act. You bought into the lie that the war of words would ‘matter’. It doesn’t – and never has. They control the words, the narrative and the outcomes. Because you refused to resist.
Rather than writing a tautological piece, why don’t you give us some suggestions of what a person can do to resist or attempt to change the obvious wrongs in the world. In order that I don’t fall into the same trap that you have here’s my suggestion. When that crazy person singles you out in the street, don’t rush by with face averted, stop and talk with them. I do. Here’s another, ride a bicycle or walk as often as you can, instead of using your car. Here’s another one, instead of replacing everything, because it’s become unfashionable or has stopped working, fix it and use it for as long as you can. The little changes that we all can make in our own lives are what will change the world.
People like Caitlin provide a valuable service to all of humanity, they dare to stick their heads above the parapet and speak the truth. They shine a light on things are controllers wish to keep hidden. That helps people who are in the dark to wake up to reality. The more people that wake up the closer we get to a world where we can all live in peace and get on with what really matters.
Thank you for your post, which I think outlines well what can and should be done now, and I’m trying to do it as well.
Best
C
Thank you C.
All the best to you.
appliquer et faire appliquer à tous ceux qui nous mentent l’indifférence réseau sociétale que j’explique par ailleurs est un début d’action concrète.
à vous d’en trouver d’autres qui rejettent la haine et ses alliés.
Interesting timing. Over the weekend https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/ was brigaded hard, desperately being painted as “Russian Bots and agents,” and I noticed in the middle of the hundreds of posts by the protagonist he slipped and referred to Syria as “us” and “we.” It struck me as odd then, and now I see this here.
It fits a pattern. Any anti-military intervention talk has been and is being smeared as Pro-Russian (“Only Putin Trolls would want you to have Medicare for All and a living wage!”), and the recent veracity of these accusations had us wondering aloud over the weekend if this wasn’t the start of a new funding cycle.
The world is a toilet. If you’re clean, Look out! I just typed those very words after reading about the fascist attack on a Canadian journalist, Nora Loreto. She’s a caring, decent human being who the crazies on the Right – and there’s too many of them – are piling on for nothing right now. One of their number signals that this person or that is the next target and they all go ape crap attacking him (or…). Nora said something about the makeup (white, males) of crash victims recently and none of her other words of sympathy, including sympathy for other crash victims at this bad intersection (that the government could do something about but doesn’t care to) are looked at by the rightwing loons who have threatened her in every sick imaginable way possible. Check out the article in Briarpatch to get a good look at how bad Canada has become.
I had only watched a Real News Network show, with Ben Norton, yesterday in which the arrival Narendra Modi in London for discussions of a free trade deal between the UK and India could be held, set off protests. In the course of the show, a video is shown of an example of how ruined – fascist and racist – Indians under Modi have become. A man is shown proving his manliness by attacking and killing someone with an axe. There’s no self-defense happening here. It was just hatred and sickness. Those images are going to stick with me for a while, unfortunately.
The war of terror on the people, and those trying to defend them, continues.
Propaganda and censorship do not only work if they’re invisible. They can also work if people are to scared to confront it, as happened in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Too scared…. (Ahhhh!)
i mean …”too scared”…. (How about an edit feature?)
There’s no longer any limit to what money can buy. I’ll say it again, It is clear to me that we are inexorably marching backward to 1984,
New loyalty oath for the Borg Media/NSA/CIA/FBI/GCHQ/City of London/Wall Street, et al.
“I pledge allegiance to the Deep State of the United States of America, and to the British Empire for which it stands, one World under Satan, indivisible, with liberty and justice for a few.”
And smart bombs for everyone else.
Please, to not head your column with a giant-sized billboard of other folk’s braggings. I wanted to share your piece on FB, but if I do, that “billboard” is what shows up.
Keep up the good work, and many thanks.
I couldn’t agree more. The propaganda is becoming so blatant and so transparent, it beggars belief that anyone with just a modicum of intelligence (you don’t need much at all) can’t see it. It’s like being slapped in the face with a wet fish and being told that it’s just a gentle breeze. How stupid do they think everyone is?
The upside is that eventually even the diehards will get bored (we can hope) with their own rhetoric as they realise that the people they are fooling the most are themselves.
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Abraham Lincoln