Part 1 of a 2 Part Series
by Media Lens / May 12th, 2016
We live in a time when state-corporate interests are cooperating to produce propaganda blitzes intended to raise public support for the demonisation and destruction of establishment enemies.
Below, we will examine five key components of an effective propaganda campaign of this kind.
1: Dramatic New Evidence
A propaganda blitz is often launched on the back of ‘dramatic new evidence’ signifying that an establishment enemy should be viewed as uniquely despicable and targeted with ‘action’.
The Blair government’s infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD contained four mentions of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD against British citizens …
A Palestinian Perspective on Britain’s ‘Anti-Semitic’ Controversy
by Ramzy Baroud / May 11th, 2016
There is a witch-hunt in the British Labor Party. Britain’s Opposition party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is being hounded for not rooting out alleged anti-Semitism in his party. Those leading the charge are pro-Israel Zionists and their supporters within the party, members who are mostly allied with the former Prime Minister, the largely discredited pro-war Tony Blair. The Blairites are quite unhappy that Corbyn, who won the party’s leadership election last September with a landslide victory is a non-elitist politician, with a deep-rooted grassroots activist past, and, yes, a strong stance for Palestinian rights.
Corbyn has been subjected to …
by Mateo Pimentel / May 11th, 2016
Y estábamos pasando el río cuando nos fusilaron con los máuseres. Me devolví porque él me dijo: ‘Sácame de aquí, paisano, no me dejes.’
— Juan Rulfo, El llano en llamas
On March 30 of this year, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC) endorsed Donald Trump, effectively backing his bid for the presidency of the United States. NBPC president Brandon Judd heads the organization, which describes itself online as “the exclusive representative of approximately 18,000 Border Patrol Agents and support personnel assigned to the U.S. Border Patrol.” Judd himself published the NBPC’s pro-Trump communiqué, asserting that “if we do not secure our …
by Lamont Lilly / May 10th, 2016
On April 2, 1969, twenty-one members of the Harlem Chapter of the Black Panther Party were formally indicted and charged with 156 counts of “conspiracy” to blow up subway and police stations, five local department stores, six railroads, and the Bronx based New York Botanical Garden.
By the early morning hours of April 3, mass sweeps were conducted city wide by combat squads of armed police. Law enforcement agencies ranging from the CIA, FBI, U.S. Marshalls and NY state police worked simultaneously to coordinate assaults on panther homes and community-based offices. After numerous raids, ten panther men and two panther women …
Bring the Blade to their Root
by L'Ordre / May 10th, 2016
An important contribution to modern political rhetoric, Jean-Paul Marat’s The Chains of Slavery (1774) is easy to dismiss as a simplistic and formative work in Europe’s climb to the French Revolution. Even “like a fairy tale”, as historian Ernest Belfort Bax called it, this book is a valuable work of political rhetoric and a glimpse into the history of dissent.
Marat’s mission was opposition to deception by any ruling regime. Although primarily opposed to the monarchs of his time, he would be no less saddened by the nature of the regimes existing today. Endless deception has become the only consistent …
by Steve Salmony / May 10th, 2016
Icebergs are breaking away from Antarctica. Greenland’s ice sheet is melting. Global sea levels are rising and temperatures are getting hotter worldwide. Arctic ice is thinning. The ocean’s surface layer is warming. Methane gas releases from permafrost and fracking as well as CO2 emissions are polluting the air. Mammals and other species are becoming extinct at an accelerating rate. All this environmental change is occurring now on our watch.
Nature itself, it appears, will likely “force our hand” to make necessary behavioral changes toward sustainability. At least one question remains open: At that future moment in space-time will global ecological circumstances have been so …
by Robert Hunziker / May 9th, 2016
Christine Lagarde, the Queen of Troika and the Head Honcho of the IMF, on May 6th, threatened to pull the IMF out of the Greek rescue plan, with a straight face, calling it a “rescue plan.” Oh, please!
Yet, it is extremely doubtful the IMF would ever entirely pull out since the plan really bails out its own constituency of banks at an unfathomable expense to the Greek people.
Meantime in Greece, transportation and civic services throughout the country grind to a screeching halt, full stop, as the people hit the streets.
Queen Christine’s backroom stratagem, described in a Wikileaks’ leaked confidential letter …
by Andrey Fomine / May 9th, 2016
Five days before the celebration of the 71st anniversary of Nazi Germany’s capitulation to the Soviet and allied troops in the WWII, the new NATO Supreme Commander in Europe Curtis Scaparrotti announced that he came to beat the drums of war again. Ignoring the historic facts and legitimate Russian interests in its around, in his first speech after assuming office he condemned alleged “Russian aggressive behavior that challenges international norms” and called the bloc members to “fight tonight if deterrence fails.”
This commonplace declaration fairly correlates with the military and media strategy the Western ruling class adopted decades ago. …
Part 5 of 5 Part Series
by Paul Haeder / May 9th, 2016
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
— Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator
What is the soul of a country, or the collective will of people who look toward flag and nation, or what can a people say about how they came into being in their geological and political space, or how the land was used in this people’s creation and how has it changed through time, or how and if the …
by Jonathan Cook / May 9th, 2016
It was an assessment no one expected from the deputy head of the Israeli military. In his Holocaust Day speech last week, Yair Golan compared current trends in Israel with Germany in the early 1930s, as Nazism took hold.
In today’s Israel, he said, could be recognised “the revolting processes that occurred in Europe … There is nothing easier than hating the stranger, nothing easier than to stir fears and intimidate.”
The furore over Golan’s remarks followed on the heels of a similar outcry in Britain at statements by former London mayor Ken Livingstone. He observed that Hitler had in practice been …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / May 9th, 2016
Nothing justifies killing of innocent people.
— Tony Blair, CNN, January 15th, 2015
The publication of the Chilcot Inquiry which began in 2009 and concluded three years ago, investigating the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, so far costing a reported £10,375,000, is to be delayed until after the June 23rd UK European Union referendum on whether Britain stays in or leaves the EU.
According to the Daily Telegraph Prime Minister David Cameron is “delaying (the) Chilcot Report to avoid embarrassing Tony Blair”, whose government’s “dodgy dossiers”, produced when he was Prime Minister, were such an integral part of America’s excuse to invade, …
by Andre Vltchek / May 9th, 2016
I am not sure who has invented those rumors that Cuba is now facing a mortal danger, that it has lost its bearings, and that it could collapse at any moment, after just one lethal visit by US President Barack Obama. The rumors and speculations are snowballing, and in some circles of the North American and European Left, they are already being confused with reality.
I know, admire and love Cuba. It is an exceptionally strong, determined and resilient nation. Reading all the alarming reports, I decided to return and to speak to the Cuban people directly.
I visited Cuba again. This …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 9th, 2016
“Big fan of LBJ, me mum,” said Chris Uhlmann, journalist for the ABC’s Twenty-Four hour television news network. And that, perhaps, was the only thing of any interest in what must be regarded as one of the most boring exhibitions of television in decades. The topic? Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s journey to seek the Governor General’s permission to dissolve both houses of parliament. An election looms.
A twenty-four hour news station on a Sunday is bound to be desperate for material, and in a country where nothing much happens of global significance, apart from a desire to intervene in distant …
by Christos Kefalis / May 8th, 2016
Contemporary art has not given us as yet many interesting works criticizing capitalist globalization. This is not because occasions and issues that could attract the attention and the sensitivity of radical artists were missing; on the contrary, globalization, with its large and growing contradictions, gave – and gives – rich material for inspiration. The very historic defeat and retreat of progressive movements and ideas during the last decades, after the dissolution of the USSR in 1990, however, went side by side with a parallel waning of progressive art. The result was a domination of colorless “lifestyle” vogue, all that apolitical …
by Jack Balkwill / May 7th, 2016
Damned by a corrupt system, it appears voters will be given a choice between Hillary Clinton and her friend Donald Trump this year, with no realistic alternative allowed by corporate media and their establishment patrons.
I say “friend” because the Clintons and Trumps have a relationship going back for years.
Seeing Trump as their enemy, many liberals are opining that Hillary is the lesser evil, saying they will vote for her.
I am not so sure Hilary’s the lesser evil. I told friends years ago that I thought she would be the next president. Long before she announced she would run …
by Gilad Atzmon / May 7th, 2016
National socialism won in Scotland (once again) and for a reason. If global capitalism is the disease, then national socialism is the remedy.
Labour wasn’t wiped out (as predicted) which suggests that the Jewish siege against Corbyn and Co didn’t dissuade Labour voters. Corbyn may now stand up and clean his party of foreign agents and Zionist oligarchs. Can he do it? Will he do it? I can only hope.
The fact that Labour didn’t increase in popularity after six years of austerity suggests that working class people in Britain are …
by Jonathan Cook / May 6th, 2016
The British Labour party, it is becoming clear, is now indulging in all-out McCarthyism against the most outspoken critics of Israel in its ranks. And almost no one seems to have the guts to call out this dangerous farce.
It has been widely reported that the Labour party has suspended (at the latest count) 19 activists – a tiny fraction of its more than 400,000 members. But aside from Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone (see my observations about their treatment here) there has been almost no serious coverage of who these people are and what they have supposedly done …
As UK Labour is again punished at the polls in England and in melt-down in Scotland
by Stuart Littlewood / May 6th, 2016
The Party’s performance once more was dismal despite the unpopularity of Cameron’s Conservatives and the irrelevance of the Liberal Democrats. Jeremy Corbyn will be surveying the election wreckage and wondering where he goes from here.
Some will blame the torrent of allegations of antisemitism. Some will say it was the gutless response to those allegations. Others know that Labour has barely laid a glove on the Conservatives and the party needs to understand that it’s there to do a job – holding the government to account – not squabbling among themselves.
Corbyn claims the party managed to “hang on” but The Mirror …
by Geraldine Perry / May 6th, 2016
The latest installment of the long-simmering Sagebrush Rebellion erupted early this year in the form an emotionally-charged, armed occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. Controversial and well publicized, this standoff ended with the tragic death of a Mormon Arizona rancher by the name of Lavoy Finicum and the jailing of the remaining alleged perpetrators.
While extreme in its tactics, this replay of the age-old battle for a “piece of the pie” was, when distilled to its essence, not unlike similar battles being waged across the U.S. At issue are the increasingly complex ways our property ownership rights …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 6th, 2016
The monstrous Siamese twin of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), has been in a growing puddle of dispute after 248 pages of its content were leaked.
The organisation behind the measure, Greenpeace Netherlands, had done its best to shed light on a document that remains obscured, clandestine and hidden. The TTIP leaks were initiated prior to the commencement of the 13th round of TTIP negotiations between the EU and the US held in New York (April 25-29). According to the organisation, the final document will consist of 25 to 30 chapters with …
