AMERICAN PROPAGANDA

YASHA LEVINE—As Decter explained, Elie Wiesel went to the Soviet Union and wrote the book only because Decter and two of his Nativ handlers from the Israeli consulate in New York pushed and persuaded him to do it. And Wiesel confirmed another aspect of the op over forty years later in a new 2011 introduction to the book: Another top Nativ secret agent — David Bartov, who then worked out of the Israeli embassy in Moscow — helped organize and supervise the Soviet part of his trip. Bartov would become the head of Nativ in the 1980s, during the most important time for the Israel’s population transfer plans — when hundreds of thousands of Jews were leaving the Soviet Union. Wiesel would describe Bartov as my “faithful friend.”

In short, The Jews of Silence was a full on propaganda op. And it came at the most perfect time, following the Six Day War, when Jews in both the Soviet Union and America were quickly being radicalized and turned to Jewish nationalism.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—When people object to criticisms of the US-centralized empire, it isn’t because those criticisms are unfounded. It’s because if those criticisms are valid, it will mean everything they believe about the world is wrong. It would be a kind of death for them, and people fear death. Because perception is reality, finding out that your entire worldview is wrong is experientially the same as losing your entire world. Losing your entire world, your belief systems, your knowing, your understanding and all the stability it gives you, is like experiencing death.

That’s why we’ve got whole cognitive defense systems in place designed to keep information that is incongruous with our worldview out of our heads. We protect our worldview like we’re protecting our own identity, because, in a very real sense, we are.

FRANK SCOTT—A couple of trillion in government spending is proposed now when tens of trillions are needed but will never be found under the market forces of private profit normalcy. The goal must be a radical restructuring of the political economic value system that treats earth, air, water and human beings as commodities to be bought, sold and rented in pursuit of enormous private profit for an ever shrinking number as hundreds of millions diversely sink lower in class status under the burden of bearing the staggering public loss of dollars, humanity and nature itself.  

PEPE ESCOBAR—Young generations, especially, must be made aware that during the Cold War, any organization fighting for the freedom of the oppressed in the developing world was dubbed “terrorist”; that was the Cold War version of the “war on terror”. Only at the end of the 20th century was the fight against apartheid accepted as a supreme moral cause; and Mandela, of course, rightfully became the universal face of the cause.

It’s easy to forget that conservative messiah Ronald Reagan – who enthusiastically hailed the precursors of al-Qaeda as “freedom fighters” – fiercely opposed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act because, what else, the African National Congress (ANC) was considered a “terrorist organization” (on top of Washington branding the ANC as “communists”).

As this historical account proves, we have meddled shamelessly in practically every nation’s internal affairs for generations across the globe: from Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile and many other “lesser nations”, to Russia, Australia, and even Italy and Canada. No one is immune from Washington’s sordid maneuvers.