Does Social Media Sell Us a Rope to Hang Capitalism?

resembles a terminated government funded social media program, and that Facebook officials have been willingly working with the imperial establishment in implementing policies.  We certainly must have a realistic expectation toward it as well.

One of the most appropriate examples of the manipulation today would be how Russia has been portrayed in our society. The western establishment has been going all the way back to 1917 to demonize the trajectory of Russia as something that can be simply described as “evil”.  Our school programs, entertainment, literature, music, movies, you name it, every layer of our society is embedded with some sort of bits and pieces indicating that “Stalin was a brutal dictator”, “communism never worked”, “socialism is undemocratic”, “evil is evil” and so on and so forth.  The Western governments have certainly put enormous efforts in setting the trajectory of anti-USSR/Russia as a hegemonic agenda to break Russia apart in extracting its resources while incorporating its people in the western capitalist order.  The demonization has been a necessary step for the imperial assault.

“The professor pointed out that historian Robert Conquest (the author of "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s" who passed away on August 3, 2015) had been working for the British Information Research Department (IRD) since its establishment and up to 1956. The IRD, originally called the Communist Information Bureau, was founded in 1947, when the Cold War era began.

"[The IRD's'] main task was to combat Communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion," Professor Furr explained.

Conquest's work was to contribute to the so-called "black history" of the Soviet Union, the professor noted, "in other words, fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion."

"His book The Great Terror, a basic anti-communist text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger Press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources," Professor Furr pointed out.

The professor remarked that to our days Conquest remains one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union for anti-communist and Russophobic historians.

The propagandist activity, masquerading as scholarship, was aimed against the USSR and coordinated by US/British intelligence.

Furr noted that Conquest periodically met with heavy criticism from prominent Western scholars, which blasted him for "consciously falsifying information" about the Soviet Union. In fact Conquest just used any source that was hostile to Stalin and the USSR, turning a blind eye to the fact whether it was reliable or not.”

Solzhenitsyn: a reactionary curmudgeon who finally exhausted the patience of even his Western handlers. Elevated to prominence as a dissident hero for his propaganda value as anti-Soviet "witness".

Another example involves the case of celebrated Soviet defector and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  His book "The Gulag Archipelago"--detailing atrocious stories of the Soviet prison system--became a huge hit in the West, while Solzhenitsyn himself was subsequently awarded a Nobel Prize.  However, beneath the official approval by the establishment, his reputation is quite questionable to say the least.  Renowned American intellectual Gore Vidal even describes him thus: "He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US." Furthermore, according to this article (which also quoted Vidal):

"Solzhenitsyn defected to the West and settled in Vermont for a time. He was a staunch supporter of U.S. imperialism, urging at one point for the U.S. to return to Vietnam and finish the job on the commies there. In time, Solzhenitsyn began to pine away for the glory days of the Tsar and his anti-Semitism became increasingly apparent to the point where even his previous imperialist backers had to abandon him. The only people who seem to invoke his name these days are nutbags from the far right like Alex Jones."

“Between 1992 and 2000, there were between five and six million “surplus deaths,” 170,000 people were murdered, the GDP fell by 50% (more than during German occupation in WW II), 70 million fell into poverty, death rates increased by 60%, like countries at war, life expectancy decreased in males to 57, abortions increased spectacularly, birth rates fell , , , suicides, tuberculosis, measles, diphtheria (eradicated in the 1930s) . . . In short (and this was supposed to be a short post) Russia, under “shock-therapy” “reforms” became the site of an economic genocide.”

Any and all attacks on Putin and Russia are regarded as legitimate and even de rigueur on the Western media, no evidence necessary. The campaign of vilification, which continues to date, spearheaded in the US by the Democrats and their numerous media shills, pushes the world ever closer to a nuclear confrontation.

More recently, the demonization of Russia has become legal ground for a legislative action.  Diana Johnstone points out the utter absurdity of the richest man in Russia Mikhail Khodorkovsky--who was jailed in Russia for engaging in criminal financial schemes to acquire public assets while giving financial opportunities to his western allies-- blatantly influencing US politics by being a part of the momentum in enacting the Magnisky Act.  All this has been going on without an objection from any US officials, meanwhile, the US government is accusing Russians of "political interventions".  She concludes in her article: