https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/21/today-in-empire-war-machine-funded-war-games-facebook-censors-hersh-and-more/
Today In Empire: War Machine-Funded War Games, Facebook Censors Hersh, And More
There’s a lot happening in the life of the empire, so we’re doing another multi-story article to wrap it all up. Today we’re discussing four stories:
- Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hersh.
- Weapons industry-funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons.
- The New York Times really, really doesn’t like RFK Jr.
- Twitter drops its “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media” labels.
1. Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hersh.
Facebook has begun censoring a Substack article by journalist Seymour Hersh which asserts that the US government, in coordination with Norway, was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines last September.
First flagged by author Michael Shellenberger on Twitter, this censorship is still occuring as of this writing some 36 hours later. If you try to share Hersh’s article on Facebook, as soon as you paste the URL you get a notification which warns, “Before you share this content, you might want to know that there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways.” It also includes a link to a month-old article by Faktisk.no, a Norwegian “fact-checking” website produced in cooperation with Norwegian mass media and Norway’s state broadcasting company NRK.
Facebook then gives you the option to “Cancel” or “Share Anyway”. If you opt for the latter, Facebook censors the article by pixelating the share like they would for images of extreme gore or hardcore pornography, and attaching a giant warning label on it saying “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” Facebook does not explain how a “fact-checking” company which operates in conjunction with Norwegian state media can be regarded as “independent” regarding an article which explicitly accuses the Norwegian government of extremely egregious crimes.
If you click through the second warning, you can finally get to Hersh’s article. If you click the option to “See why” the article is being hidden from visibility, you are taken to a Faktisk.no article “Flere feil om norsk innblanding i Nord Stream-sabotasjen” (“More mistakes about Norwegian interference in the Nord Stream sabotage,” subtitled “The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh accuses Norway of being behind the Nord Stream explosions. But his article contains several errors.” per machine translation).
The article disputes Hersh’s claims using arguments that have been circulating since February, many of which have been disputed. But whether you think Hersh’s claims are valid or not, his reporting is indisputably a part of the conversation about the Nord Stream sabotage and is newsworthy in itself. The world’s largest social media platform is straightforwardly interfering in news distribution.
Facebook is also censoring another article by Hersh published earlier this month which alleges that the Ukrainian government has been embezzling at least $400 million from US taxpayers to illicitly purchase diesel fuel from Russia, and that the CIA knows about this. If you paste the URL into the Facebook share box to that article you get a warning like the one for the Nord Stream article, only this one includes a link to an article by the empire-funded Ukrainian infowar website StopFake.
As Mintpress News’ Alan MacLeod reported last year, StopFake is funded by the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy and the empire-funded NATO think tank The Atlantic Council, as well as the British government and the Czech Republic. Despite this extremely obvious conflict of interest, Facebook has the temerity to call StopFake an “independent fact-checker” in the warnings it provides while censoring Hersh’s Ukraine article. One even goes so far as to say that “Independent fact-checkers say that this information has no basis in fact.”
The Ukraine article is pixelated just like the Nord Stream one:
The StopFake article looks nothing remotely like an “independent fact-checker”, written in typical ham-fisted Ukrainian infowar style beneath the words “FAKE” in red capital letters and citing nothing besides government assertions and its own forceful tone.
Dismissing the renowned journalist Seymour Hersh’s article as his “personal blog,” StopFake informs us that “American auditors and the White House have repeatedly stressed that after more than a year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, they found no violations by Ukraine in the use of Western weapons and material assistance.”
Oh well okay then.
2. Weapons industry-funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons.
The House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party decided to roleplay as generals in a war game simulating a PRC attack on Taiwan. The war game was facilitated by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think tank, whose top donors include war industry giants Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, as well as the US Department of Defense and the de facto embassy of Taiwan.
Now this is going to surprise you and astonish you and take you aback, but believe it or not the war game conducted by the weapons industry-funded think tank has revealed that Taiwan is going to need a lot more weapons.
“We are well within the window of maximum danger for a Chinese Communist Party invasion of Taiwan, and yesterday’s war game stressed the need to take action to deter CCP aggression and arm Taiwan to the teeth before any crisis begins,” said the incredibly hawkish chairman of the Select Committee Mike Gallagher in a statement.
Another thing that’s going to shock and astonish and surprise you (and you might want to sit down for this one) is that none of the reporting on this war game from the political/media class has made any mention of the immense conflict of interest that the Center for a New American Security would necessarily have in this war game. Articles by Reuters, The Hill and The National Review ominously informing their audiences of the grave findings of the war game have made precisely zero mention of the think tank’s funders, giving the impression that these are just impartial foreign policy experts and not indirect employees of the war profiteering industry.
As I never tire of reminding my readers, this is journalistic malpractice. It is never legitimate to mention war machine-funded think tanks promoting more war and militarism without also informing readers of their obvious conflict of interest in the matter.
The Center for a New American Security is one of the nastiest think tanks pulling strings in the information ecosystem today. As we discussed last year when CNAS bizarrely hosted another one of its “war games” on MSNBC, it has extensive degrees of overlap with the Biden administration and has been playing a crucial role in marketing war with China to American liberals.
One of the most insane things happening in the world right now is the way the entire political/media class routinely cites war machine-funded think tanks in the promotion and formulation of important foreign policy decisions without ever disclosing this extreme conflict of interest to the public. Future generations, if there are future generations, will scarce believe we once allowed war profiteers to directly influence government policies on war and militarism using the money they made from profiting off war and militarism. It’s one of the most evil arrangements you could possibly come up with.
3. The New York Times really, really doesn’t like RFK Jr.
The New York Times has published an article in its “news” section — not labeled “opinion” or anything — smearing Robert F Kennedy Jr for his Democratic presidential primary candidacy with jaw-dropping aggression.
The article’s author, Trip Gabriel, comes right out of the gate claiming that Kennedy has announced a presidential campaign built on “shaking Americans’ faith in science.” Again, I cannot stress this enough, this is presented by The New York Times as a hard news story.
Gabriel describes Kennedy’s campaign announcement speech as “rambling”, calls him a “fringe” presidential aspirant, and strongly implies that Kennedy is only running to bring attention to himself. He goes out of his way to say that Kennedy’s campaign has “appalled” members of his famous Democratic family, and quotes a former aide to Ted Kennedy as saying RFK Jr’s presidential run is “contrary to everything his uncle Ted Kennedy ever did.”
I’m not going to support any US presidential candidate and it’s as certain as sunrise that whoever gets sworn in on January 2025 will be a corrupt and murderous swamp monster like all the rest, but I do expect that candidates like Kennedy will cause the propaganda machine to overextend itself in some ways that can be useful in highlighting its nefariousness for the public. Framing an obvious spin piece as hard news is brazen journalistic malpractice, one more item on the mountain of evidence that The New York Times is garbage.
4. Twitter drops its “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media” labels.
In some positive news, Twitter has taken the unannounced step of removing all “government-funded” and “state-affiliated media” labels from all accounts of every national origin. The “state-affiliated media” labels have been removed from accounts like RT and Press TV, as well as from individuals who’d been branded with that label because of their associations with state media, and the “government-funded” label has been removed from outlets like NPR, PBS and CBC.
If this turns out to be a permanent move, it is an objectively good thing. The use of these labels has always been blatantly propagandistic and obscenely biased in favor of the US and its allies, and should never have happened in the first place. It’s not Twitter’s place to make sure people trust western propaganda outlets and distrust propaganda outlets from Russia and China; that’s the role of a propagandist, not an impartial platform for free communication.
I’ve been very critical of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and generally dismissive of claims that his ownership is a marked improvement over the previous owners, but if this is for real I’ll have to eat a big steaming pile of crow, because Twitter functioning less as a US propaganda organ is indisputably a significant improvement. If his free speech values aren’t just limited to easing hate speech restrictions and actually create a more egalitarian information ecosystem on real matters of international consequence, I was definitely wrong, and the platform is better off under his control.
....
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/04/20/the-empire-of-lies-2/
The Empire of Lies
A new book by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of the Institute of Political Economy in the USA, The Empire of Lies, has recently been published by Korsgaard Publishing.
The very title of the book tells about its goal, which is to present the truth to the readers or to debunk the realm of lies in which we have been living for decades. The undoubted importance of this book is primarily given by the authority and rich biography of the book’s author, who has extensive experience in various fields such as economics, academic education, business, journalism and government. The author has so far written 12 books that have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Czech, Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese.
The publisher, respected Mr. Soren Roest Korsgaard, states the book’s importance: “In order to act appropriately on any crisis – whether it is manufactured or organic – it is most important that we have access to objective and reliable information. Governments and industry – often acting in collusion with each other – often exploit or create crises to implement their agendas, such as mass surveillance and mandatory vaccination. To do this, they use the corporate media to broadcast deception and employ a host of hand-picked ‘experts’ who agree with the official agenda.”
How the media and the hired “experts” work to create a false image that they project to the public, we clarified in a recent documentary film (produced by the Center for Geostrategic Studies and TV Slavija info), titled “When Lying Becomes a Profession.” The problem is that in addition to the main stream media, interest groups are now using the internet media as well as social networks to manipulate the public. On that topic, Mr. Korsgaard says, “Even online, it’s extremely difficult to find quality information. Having successfully concentrated most internet activity on just a few sites, such as the Google search engine which handles over 90% of all search queries worldwide, the establishment is able to implement censorship on an unprecedented scale using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other advanced technologies. Unfortunately, there is every reason to believe that large-scale censorship will only progress.”
In this regard, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts’ book, The Empire of Lies, aims to instruct readers on the means and methods of manipulation employed by the establishment, so that knowledge will enable them to decode future deceptions and orchestrated crises. In order to recognize disinformation spread by the establishment in the future, we must first understand past deceptions.
The book consists of five thematic parts containing texts published in different time periods. Texts that were written and published in previous years seem like fulfilled prophecies today. Namely, many statements from ten years ago are more than obvious today, which speaks of the foresight and precision with which they were written. Paul Craig Roberts is an outstanding economic expert who described the scale of today’s economic collapse in the West more than ten years ago, as he himself says, running the risk of being accused of being a conspiracy theorist or an America hater. In the first section, “The Ministry of Truth,” dealing with the media, censorship, methods of manipulation and propaganda, Craig Roberts says: “The ancient Greeks understood this well. In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a prophetess that no one believed despite her 100% proof that she was right. Telling the truth to Americans or Europeans is just as expensive as telling the truth to the Greeks of ancient mythology.” He goes on to describe very impressively: “Indeed, telling the truth is criminalized in the US.” If that is the case in the USA, and I believe the author of the book that it is, the question is what can we expect in Europe or even worse in the Balkans, which is the Middle East of Europe?
It has been shown in many examples that Europe blindly follows the policy of the American establishment, and is often more explicit about it than the US. Yes, of course, and from my personal experience of criticizing the regime in Serbia, which has been implementing the policy of other people’s interests for more than ten years, I can confirm that this is so. More than once, the regime tried to label me in different ways, marginalize and criminalize me. Although I have always defined the facts very clearly and precisely, many in Serbia did not want to accept them, because it is much easier for them to accept sweet lies, and probably more profitable. In my opinion, this is participation in collective high treason. Consciously or unconsciously, the result is the same. But let’s go back to Mr. Paul Craig Roberts and his views: “The American media specializes in fake news. Indeed, since the Clinton regime, the American media has produced nothing but fake news. Do you remember the illegal American bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia? Do you remember the war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president branded as the Balkan butcher who was compared to Hitler until Hillary transferred that title to the president of Russia? Milosevic, not Bill Clinton, was arrested and tried before Međunar International Criminal Court. He died in prison, some say even killed, before the International Criminal Court acquitted him.” Indeed, it is absolutely necessary to always mention the example of Yugoslavia and the created propaganda campaign that was conducted against the Serbs in allegations about fake news. There are other examples, of course, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Russia, but the Serbs were the first victims of that dark campaign of lies that started with Clinton.
Dr. Roberts asks: “Do you remember the American coup in Ukraine against the democratically elected government and its replacement by a neo-Nazi regime? Do you remember that Washington’s crime against Ukrainian democracy was quickly hidden behind false accusations of ‘Russian invasion’? Can you think of any true reporting in the American news in the last two decades?” He goes on to talk about the Assange case as a key example that testifies to the extent to which human liberties and freedom of speech as a whole are threatened. What defines the big problem is that people are taught to trust the government and the media. I think that this is a key problem in the case of the “trust” that Vučić gains among the older population that spends a lot of time in front of the television.
In the second part of the book, you can read a very expert chronological analysis of the economic collapse of the West. Back in 2012, Craig Roberts states: “The American financial system and, probably, the financial system of Europe, as well as the police, no longer serve a useful social purpose.”
In the US, the police have proven to be a greater threat to public safety than private sector criminals. I just googled ―police brutality and got 183,000,000 results. When I read this, at the moment I had before my eyes the image of Serbian policemen in full war gear who show brutality against the citizens (whom they are supposed to serve), because the citizens oppose the organization of a parade of debauchery. Of course, we can also think of the citizens of France who are brutally beaten at demonstrations. We saw it in Greece, Germany, in many places. All this fits very logically into the concept in which Europe is practically an American satellite. All trends come from Washington, including the economic crisis. Paul Craig Roberts analyzes the level of poverty in American society, the level of income and living conditions, the economic stratification of society, the concentration of wealth and concludes: “The United States has failed economically, socially, politically, legally, constitutionally and ecologically. The country that exists today is not even a shell of the country in which I was born.”
For such a situation, he blames the political elites of both parties. In addition to the role of political elites, in the book he analyzes in great detail the role of banking elites who, in conjunction with politics and the media, created a false picture of economic stability. Back in 2012, the author of the book predicted that the BRICS states will take over economic supremacy. “BRICS – Brazil, the largest economy in South America, Russia, a nuclear-armed and energy-independent economy on which Western Europe (Washington’s puppets of NATO) depends for energy, India , nuclear-armed and one of Asia’s two rising giants, nuclear-armed China, Washington’s largest creditor (except the Fed), supplier of American manufactured and advanced technology products, and the new scarecrow of the next profitable Cold War military-security complex, and South Africa, Africa’s largest economy–are in the process of forming a new bank. The new bank will enable the five major economies to conduct their trade without the use of the US dollar.” As a confirmation of that, today we can observe the latest phase of de-dollarization. But despite the fact that things are obvious, the vast majority of die-hard supporters of the West do not recognize that such a thing is happening. They simply live in their own virtual world where America is still the best in everything. When you present them with the facts, they start accusing you of talking nonsense. That is why it is extremely important that they hear the facts from an American expert with great authority.
What else I found interesting to read in the book is how the establishment cleverly reduces unemployment, using administrative rules. The same as Aleksandar Vučić is doing in Serbia. Namely, someone who is on the unemployment list has the obligation to report to that institution every couple of months. He also has an obligation to accept the jobs offered by the service. If he does not report once every three months, or rejects three job offers offered by the service, he is automatically removed from the unemployment register and loses his rights to certain benefits (such as cheaper public transportation, etc.). Now imagine that the service offers an unemployed engineer a job as a waiter, conductor or courier, and when you don’t accept jobs that are far below your qualifications, they delete you from the unemployment register. And imagine, the state managed to reduce the number of unemployed! Just fantastic. I was interested to read in the book that it is actually an American model.
Further in the book, the author describes the manipulations of the Central Bank (FED), private banks and financial elites: “What we are witnessing is that our central bank is withdrawing all measures on integrity and legality in order to serve the small number of banks that financial deregulation has enabled to become ‘too big to fail’ at the expense of our economy and our currency. When the FED runs out of gold to lend, rehypothecate and rob from ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds), the FED will have to abandon QE (quantitative easing) or the US dollar will collapse, and with it Washington’s power to hegemony over the world” – author’s quote from 2014.
Therefore, it cannot be said that there were no experts in America who very clearly and precisely defined what we now see as the epilogue of the last phase of the economic collapse of the West. However, the problem is that the level of corruption and manipulation is so high that there was no chance to turn things around. That’s what Craig Roberts explains in an article called: “How Economists and Policymakers Killed Our Economy.”
“The economy has been weakened by the displacement of middle-class jobs in favor of corporate profits and the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing to support a few oversized banks that the government protects from market discipline,” the author emphasizes.
In the book, one can find numerous other expert explanations of the causes of the looming collapse of the Western economic system, which represents the special value of this work.
The third part of the book is dedicated to the Ukrainian crisis, where the author defines how the USA helped organize the coup d’état in Kiev and bring the neo-Nazi regime to power. The fourth and fifth parts of the book are dedicated to exposing historical lies as well as those from recent history such as 9/11 and the attack on the Twin Towers. I will write about it in one of the following analyses. In any case, I sincerely recommend Paul Craig Roberts’ new book , The Empire of Lies, in which you will discover precious truths that are important to know because of what lies ahead. And that is the fight for freedom and the right to exist at all as people on this planet.
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