GREG KASANSAKIS—Please help me understand what this crazy thing is. I’m terminally baffled. Can this be the supposedly awe-inspiring IDF?
BATTLE OF COMMUNICATIONS
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JOHN PILGER—A powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of embedded and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an electronic battlefield in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims. But who is the real enemy?
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Losurdo, Chomsky, Brar: Highly Recommended Books & Documents
13 minutes readEDITOR—In Stalin: History and Critique of A Black Legend (2008), Losurdo stimulated a debate about Joseph Stalin, about whom he claimed is built a kind of black legend intended to discredit the whole of communism. Losurdo clearly saw that the nonstop demonisation of Stalin was simply the utterly cynical propaganda part of the West’s multidirectional war on the Soviet Union, a war that the collective West had been waging on the Bolsheviks from the moment the revolution came to power in 1917.
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ALEX GUTENTAG—Last week, Matt Taibbi reported that CTIL’s Terp had previously worked with Jonathon Morgan, the person who created the Hamilton 68 project, which spread the conspiracy theory that Trump supporters and right-wing populists on social media were secretly Russian bots. “The impact of Hamilton on the domestic news landscape almost can’t be calculated,” explained Taibbi. MSNBC, he wrote, invoked Hamilton 68 at least 279 times to exaggerate the threat of Russian disinformation.
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Taiwan opposition has shot itself — and the island — in the foot
34 minutes readALEX LO—As a former envoy for the island in Washington with plenty of connections with both the Republican and Democratic parties, Hsiao will make the perfect conduit in Taipei for anti-China hawks from the US. Instead of moderating from Tsai’s constant cross-strait provocations, the pair may well worsen them.