GREG MAYBURY—It needs be noted that there was much political capital to be gained by those in Washington and most of America’s allies in the West by blaming Russia for the MH-17 tragedy. The U.S. and said allies had already blamed the crisis in Ukraine that derived from the February 2014 coup on Russian “aggression” and Putin’s purported ambitions to resurrect the Soviet Union. So in one sense it was to be expected they’d seek to capitalize on this disaster by blaming the Russians.
AMERICAN BRAINWASH
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In line with the Syrian Arab Army’s operation to liberate Eastern Ghouta on the outskirts of Damascus — a part of Syria occupied by various Salafi-jihadi groups since 2012 — this mainstream media coverage has lost the plot; painting a picture of an upside down world in which murderous sectarian fanatics are depicted as rebels, while the army fighting them, a conscript army that draws its soldiers from every part of the multicultural and multi-faith mosaic that is Syrian society, is depicted as a latter day Waffen SS: an army of invasion and occupation instead of liberation.
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GARY KOHLS—In one of the four responses to the above, Scpat says: Cass Sunstein: “those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a crippled epistemology…the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups.” Translation: “Those who question the government narrative and mainstream consensus are extremists who need to be dealt with. We can’t have free-thinking individuals roaming around our streets, spreading their damn truth!” In my opinion, some decent solutions to the govt’s disinfo campaign is to have multiple sources of information, think critically about each, and don’t take websites or media figures’ words as gospel truth on everything.
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CAiTLIN JOHNSTONE—In this three-minute video Tim Wise brilliantly describes the way whiteness as a concept didn’t exist in early colonial America, where those of European ancestry identified with the specific country their family immigrated from, not the color of their skin. It wasn’t until white indentured servants and black slaves became a threat to power that the notion of whiteness was bestowed as a badge of honor upon poor whites by rich whites, a divide-and-conquer manipulation which was used to protect the interests of slaveowners for generations.
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The $1.5 Billion Campaign to Whitewash Genocide in Yemen
27 minutes readDAN GLAZEBROOK—You would think a strategy aimed at starving the world’s most starving population still further would be a hard sell. But, then, money not only talks, it silences. And $1.5 billion is a lot of money. The UN’s own ‘Humanitarian Response Plan’ for Yemen, issued just two days before the YCHO, on 20th January, had noted that “Al Hudaydah port, which accounts for 70-80 per cent of commercial imports in Yemen, remains a critical lifeline, despite operating at reduced capacity after being hit by an airstrike in August 2015”, adding that “the extended blockade imposed on Al Hudaydah and Salif ports on 6 November 2017 significantly threatened this lifeline of Yemenis” and that “only a sustained flow of imports of essential basic goods can avert further catastrophe”.