Atlantic Alliance media apparatus lashing out like a
dying demon at the reality of being successfully confronted by the truth
In mid-April, hundreds of U.S. paratroopers from the
173rd Airborne Brigade arrived in western Ukraine to provide training for
government troops. The UK had already started its troop-training mission there,
sending 75 troops to Kiev in March. [1] On April 14, the Canadian government
announced that Canada will send 200 soldiers to Kiev, contributing to a
military build-up on Russia’s doorstep while a fragile truce is in place in
eastern Ukraine.
The Russian Embassy in Ottawa called the decision “counterproductive and deplorable,” stating that the foreign ministers of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine have “called for enhanced intra-Ukrainian political dialogue,” as agreed upon in the Minsk-2 accords in February, and that it would be “much more reasonable to concentrate on diplomacy…” [2]
That viewpoint is shared by many, especially in Europe
where few are eager for a “hot” war in the region. Nor are most people
enamoured of the fact that more billions are being spent on a new arms-race,
while “austerity” is preached by the 1 Per Cent.
But in the Anglo-American corridors of power (also
called the Atlantic Alliance), such views are seen to be the result of
diabolical propaganda spread through the Internet by Russia’s “secret army.” On
April 15, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Ed Royce
(R-Calif.), held a hearing entitled “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of
Information,” with Royce claiming that Russian propaganda threatens “to
destabilize NATO members, impacting our security commitments.” [3]
The Committee heard from three witnesses: Elizabeth
Wahl, former anchor for the news agency Russia Today (RT) who gained her moment
of fame by resigning on camera in March 2014; Peter Pomerantsev, Senior Fellow
at the Legatum Institute (a right-wing UK think-tank); and Helle C. Dale,
Senior Fellow for Public Diplomacy at The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing
U.S. think-tank. [4] The Foreign Affairs Committee website contains video clips
of the first two witnesses – well worth watching if you enjoy Orwellian
rhetoric passionately delivered.
The day before the hearing, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Royce wrote, “Vladimir Putin has a secret army. It’s an army of thousands of ‘trolls,’ TV anchors and others who work day and night spreading anti-American propaganda on the Internet, airwaves and newspapers throughout Russia and the world. Mr. Putin uses these misinformation warriors to destabilize his neighbors and control parts of Ukraine. This force may be more dangerous than any military, because no artillery can stop their lies from spreading and undermining U.S. security interests in Europe.” [5]
In her formal (printed) submission, Ms. Wahl referred to
the Internet’s “population of paranoid skeptics” and wrote: “The paranoia
extends to believing that Western media is not only complicit, but instrumental
in ensuring Western dominance.”
Helle C. Dale warned of “a new kind of propaganda, aimed
at sowing doubt about anything having to do with the U.S. and the West, and in
a number of countries, unsophisticated audiences are eating it up.”
Peter Pomerantsev claimed that Russia’s goal is “to
trash the information space with so much disinformation so that a conversation
based on actual facts would become impossible.” He added, “Throughout Europe
conspiracy theories are on the rise and in the US trust in the media has
declined. The Kremlin may not always have initiated these phenomena, but it is
fanning them…Democracies are singularly ill equipped to deal with this type of
warfare. For all of its military might, NATO cannot fight an information war.
The openness of democracies, the very quality that is meant to make them more
competitive than authoritarian models, becomes a vulnerability.”
Chairman Royce called for “clarifying” the mission of
the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the U.S. federal agency whose
networks include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle
East Broadcasting Networks (Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa), Radio Free Asia, and
the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio and TV Marti). [6]
The BBG is apparently in disarray. According to Helle
Dale’s submission, on March 4, 2015, Andrew Lack, the newly hired CEO of BBG’s
International Broadcasting, left the position after only six weeks on the job.
On April 7, the Director of Voice of America, David Ensor, announced that he
was leaving.
Andrew Lack was formerly the president of NBC News. As
Paul Craig Roberts has recently noted, Lack’s first official statement as CEO
of the BBG “compared RT, Russia Today, the Russian-based news agency, with the
Islamic State and Boko Haram. In other words, Mr. Lack brands RT as a terrorist
organization. The purpose of Andrew Lack’s absurd comparison is to strike fear
at RT that the news organization will be expelled from US media markets. Andrew
Lack’s message to RT is: ‘lie for us or we are going to expel you from our air
waves.’ The British already did this to Iran’s Press TV. In the United States
the attack on Internet independent media is proceeding on several
fronts.” [7]
Ironically, however, it’s likely that one of the biggest
threats (especially in Europe) to Anglo-American media credibility about
Ukraine and other issues is coming from a very old-fashioned medium – a book.
Udo Ulfkotte’s bestseller Bought Journalists has been a sensation in Germany since its publication last autumn. The journalist and former editor of one of Germany’s largest newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, revealed that he was for years secretly on the payroll of the CIA and was spinning the news to favour U.S. interests.
Udo Ulfkotte’s bestseller Bought Journalists has been a sensation in Germany since its publication last autumn. The journalist and former editor of one of Germany’s largest newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, revealed that he was for years secretly on the payroll of the CIA and was spinning the news to favour U.S. interests.
Moreover he alleges that some major media are nothing more than propaganda outlets for international think-tanks, intelligence agencies, and corporate high-finance. “We’re talking about puppets on a string,” he says, “journalists who write or say whatever their masters tell them to say or write. If you see how the mainstream media is reporting about the Ukraine conflict and if you know what’s really going on, you get the picture. The masters in the background are pushing for war with Russia and western journalists are putting on their helmets.” [8]
In another interview, Ulfkotte said: “The German and
American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to
Russia. This is a point of no return, and I am going to stand up and say…it is
not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make
propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do, and have
done in the past, because they are bribed to betray the people not only in
Germany, all over Europe.” [9]
With the credibility of the corporate media tanking,
Eric Zuesse recently wrote, “Since Germany is central to the Western Alliance –
and especially to the American aristocracy’s control over the European Union,
over the IMF, over the World Bank, and over NATO – such a turn away from the
American Government [narrative] threatens the dominance of America’s
aristocrats (who control our Government). A breakup of America’s [Atlantic]
‘Alliance’ might be in the offing, if Germans continue to turn away from being
just America’s richest ‘banana republic’.” [10]
No wonder the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on
April 15 had such urgent rhetoric, especially from Peter Pomerantsev, Senior
Fellow at the Legatum Institute – a London-based international think-tank whose
motto is “Prosperity Through Revitalizing Capitalism and Democracy” and whose
stated mission is “promoting prosperity through individual liberty, free
enterprise and entrepreneurship, character and values.”
At the end of March, Conservative London mayor Boris
Johnson (named as a potential successor to David Cameron) helped launch the
Legatum Institute’s “Vision of Capitalism” speakers’ series, whose rallying cry
is “It’s time for friends of capitalism to fight back.” [11] The sponsor of the
event was the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association (BVCA),
whose membership comprises “more than 500 influential firms, including over 230
private equity and venture capital houses, as well as institutional investors,
professional advisers, service providers and international associations.” It is
not clear whether the BVCA is also sponsoring the Legatum Institute’s “Vision
of Capitalism” series.
The Legatum Institute was founded by billionaire
Christopher Chandler’s Legatum Ltd. – a private investment firm headquartered
in Dubai. According to The Legatum Institute’s website, its executives and
fellows write for an impressive number of major media outlets, including the
Washington Post, Slate, the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, New
Republic, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, the London Review of Books, the
Atlantic, and the Financial Times.
Nonetheless, the Legatum Institute’s Peter Pomeranzev
told the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs that “Russia has launched an
information war against the West – and we are losing.”
Chairperson Ed Royce noted during the hearing that if certain things are repeated over and over, a “conspiracy theory” takes on momentum and a life of its own.
Chairperson Ed Royce noted during the hearing that if certain things are repeated over and over, a “conspiracy theory” takes on momentum and a life of its own.
Pomeranzev said the Kremlin is “pushing out more conspiracy”
and he explained, “What is conspiracy – sort of a linguistic sabotage on the
infrastructure of reason. I mean you can’t have a reality-based discussion when
everything becomes conspiracy. In Russia, the whole discourse is conspiracy.
Everything is conspiracy.” He added, “Our global order is based on
reality-based politics. If that reality base is destroyed, then you can’t have
international institutions, international dialogue.” Lying, he said, “makes a
reality-based politics impossible” and he called it “a very
insidious trend.”
Apparently, Pomeranzev has forgotten that important
October 2004 article by Ron Suskind published in the New York Times Magazine
during the second war in Iraq (which, like the first, was based on a widely
disseminated lie). Suskind quoted one of George W. Bush’s aides (probably Karl
Rove): “The aide said that guys like me [journalists, writers, historians] were
‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who
‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality…That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued.
‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again,
creating other new realities which you can study too, and that’s how things
will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do’.” [12]
It’s a rather succinct description of Orwellian spin and
secrecy in a media-saturated Empire, where discerning the truth becomes ever
more difficult.
That is why people believe someone like Udo Ulfkotte,
who is physically ill, says he has only a few years left to live, and told an
interviewer, “I am very fearful of a new war in Europe, and I don’t like to
have this situation again, because war is never coming from itself, there is
always people who push for war, and this is not only politicians, it is
journalists too…We have betrayed our readers, just to push for war…I don’t want
this anymore, I’m fed up with this propaganda. We live in a banana republic and
not in a democratic country where we have press freedom…” [13]
Recently, as Mike Whitney has pointed out in
CounterPunch (March 10), Germany’s newsmagazine Der Spiegel dared to challenge
the fabrications of NATO’s top commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove,
for spreading “dangerous propaganda” that is misleading the public about
Russian “troop advances” and making “flat-out inaccurate statements” about
Russian aggression.
Whitney asks, “Why this sudden willingness to share the
truth? It’s because they no longer support Washington’s policy, that’s why. No
one in Europe wants the US to arm and train the Ukrainian army. No wants them
to deploy 600 paratroopers to Kiev and increase U.S. logistical support. No one
wants further escalation, because no wants a war with Russia. It’s that
simple.” [14] Whitney argued that “the real purpose of the Spiegel piece is to
warn Washington that EU leaders will not support a policy of military
confrontation with Moscow.”
So now we know the reason for the timing of the April 15 U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing,
“Confronting Russia’s
Weaponization of Information.” Literally while U.S. paratroopers were en route
to Kiev, the hawks in Washington (and London) knew it was time to crank up the
rhetoric. The three witnesses were most eager to oblige.
Source: Russia Insider 25-04-2015
