The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign

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EXPOSING CAPITALISM’S MULTITUDE OF VICES AND INCURABLE PROBLEMS—
FROM INGRAINED RACISM and TERRIBLE ECONOMIC CRISES & EXPLOITATION TO ENDLESS WARS

Matt Taibbi

The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign

If “misinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny is the best hit artist NBC News has left on its roster, it might be time to shutter the network

   

NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny wrote:

After over a year, the House committee investigating researchers and their work on disinformation… has yet to produce tangible results. Public hearings have not yielded actionable evidence that the federal government has been weaponized… There have been no legal wins and no legislation has been passed.

Zadrozny in the same article said that “until recently,” people like Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Elon Musk and I have been “extraordinarily successful” in fighting what we call the “censorship machine,” adding, “in the past two years, government efforts to respond to disinformation have been shuttered.” Yet the same efforts, in the same time period, yielded “no tangible results.” This is NBC News. Who edits these people?

Regarding “no legal wins and no legislation”: as Jordan’s Committee noted Monday, the House passed “The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act” last year, and the Censorship Accountability Act recently passed in Committee. If you want to argue a bill not yet signed into law doesn’t count as “passed” legislation, fine, but “no legal wins”? The Murthy v. Missouri censorship lawsuit before the Supreme Court is there because four federal judges already ruled government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are likely in violation of the First Amendment.

Does NBC mean “no legal wins,” except the ones that sent the issue to the Supreme Court?

Those cases came in addition to a long list of developments, like the NIHfreezing a $150 million content-flagging program, the shutdown of “Singing Censor” Nina Jankowicz’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board idea, even cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) budget, all of which are at the center of innumerable mawkish media freakouts over the recent slowing of state censorship programs. Such pieces often feature a photo of a “disinformation researcher” looking sad (theWashington Post has done at least three). Even Zadrozny’s new effort is headlined “The disinformation war has taken a toll, but researchers feel a shift.” But apparently not a tangible toll.

The New York Times, 60 Minutes, and NBC now have all rushed out hit jobs against “Republicans and their allies” who’ve exposed government censorship programs, denouncing “right-wing efforts” by “conservative activists” to halt “critical investigative work.” Apparently, I’m part of those efforts. I’ve never voted Republican or donated to conservative causes, and hold no “right wing” views. Why not just add a half-line like “as well as traditional free speech liberals,” to be more accurate? No good: this would threaten the central thesis of all these pieces, that only conspiracy-mongering “Republican allies” could oppose these beneficent moderation programs.

As with the absurd Times piece, similarly intended to influence the Supreme Court and help re-ignite state censorship programs during an election year, Zadrozny tried to re-frame the Twitter Files reports as a conspiracy tale spun by former Trump official Mike Benz:

a former alt-right vlogger, who turned a two-month stint in the State Department in 2020 into a claimed expertise in cybersecurity.

Zadrozny wrote to me before publication, but I didn’t see the query. Noting NBC extended a post-publication correction to fellow dingbat censorship advocate Kate Starbird, I told her I’d begun publishing my thesis months before meeting Benz, that it was false to suggest any of my ideas were his, and NBC should include my denial. Among other things, why not? Who would it hurt, to be more accurate? Her response: “We feel confident in the… reporting.” In other words, fuck you.


Racket News offer in case you are interested.


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Capitalist DNA Kills: The 737 Max Story. Why The Boeing Problem Will Not Go Away

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Why the Right worships Javier Milei

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UNHERD

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Milei unherd

Milei, like most libertarians, is fiercely ahistorical. And so are the desperate masses momentarily following his toxic prescriptions. The Pinochet regime, and the equally criminal junta that ruled Argentina for almost a decade, also tried to impose neoliberalism at any cost, and they both had to rule their societies at bayonet point. Despite its allure to the naive, libertarianism is a surefire recipe for social disaster.


MARCH 15, 2024   6 MINS

Javier Milei, Argentina’s self-styled “anarcho-capitalist” president, enjoys an almost Christ-like status among heterodox conservatives and MAGA-style Right-wingers, almost on a par with Trump himself. Like lovestruck teenagers, a certain type of conservative drools over Milei’s over-the-top mannerisms and “based” speeches against “libtards” and “communists”.

There is, however, a problem: aside from his questionable hairstyle and swamp-draining rhetoric, Milei actually has very little in common with Trump. For all his faults, Trump stood on a platform that rejected the neoliberal orthodoxy that had defined the Republican Party ever since the Reagan era. Trump’s agenda, by contrast, was markedly anti-libertarian: he advocated economic nationalism and protectionism, lambasted globalisation, promised to protect social welfare programmes, vowed to support local industries, and even courted the labour movement.

Though he didn’t deliver on all those fronts, Trumpism, like analogue national-conservative movements in Europe, encapsulated an intuitive understanding that the values cherished by conservatives — family, community, religion, solidarity — can only flourish in a context where the state intervenes to restrain the socially destructive effects of unfettered capitalism. Trump’s former US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer captured the new conservative zeitgeist when he said that libertarianism is “a philosophy for stupid people”.




In this regard, as Sohrab Ahmari has noted, Milei represents a rejection of “nearly everything ‘MAGA’ populists… claim to stand for”. Milei is a self-described ultra-libertarian and pro-market extremist who has vowed to “liberalise and privatise everything” (including organ transplants), slash welfare programmes, gut workers’ rights and permanently shackle the Argentine economy to the Federal Reserve by abolishing the Central Bank of Argentina and adopting the US dollar as the national currency. “The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself,” Milei said at the latest WEF summit, echoing Reagan’s famous inaugural address.

And yet, his agenda doesn’t so much resemble the Western neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher as the much more extreme neoliberal regimes implemented in the Seventies and Eighties by the US-backed military juntas that ruled much of Latin America at the time. Even Milei’s rhetoric seems to be plucked straight out of the Eighties playbook: he claims to be on a holy crusade against “communism”, which he accuses of being the root of all Argentina’s, and indeed the West’s, ills.

Of those ills, none is of greater concern to ordinary Argentines than inflation — or rather, hyperinflation. The country has been suffering from soaring prices for years. By the time of last year’s presidential election, the rate of inflation had reached a staggering 150%. No wonder Milei’s anti-elite rhetoric and promises to take a sledgehammer to the economy resonated with so many Argentines. Unfortunately, however, Milei’s slash-and-burn policies will only make a bad situation worse.

While Milei has only been in power for a few months, the consequences of his scorched-earth economic approach are already being felt. His first decision was to devalue the Argentine peso by 50% — part of an “economic shock therapy” that he claimed was necessary to fix the country’s problems. Yet, as was to be expected, the drastic devaluation of the peso has only caused inflation to skyrocket even further, almost doubling to 250% since Milei took office in December. Since then, the price of gas has doubled, while food prices and healthcare costs have risen by roughly 50%, according to official government data. Meanwhile, salaries and pensions have failed to keep up, leading to the largest contraction in workers’ purchasing power in decades.

To make matters worse, Milei has stayed true to his promise of taking a metaphorical “chainsaw” to public spending, slashing subsidies in a wide range of sectors, from transport to utilities — on top of shutting down half of the country’s ministries. For ordinary citizens, the effects have been devastating. According to a recent study by the Catholic University of Argentina, poverty levels have risen to 57% — the highest level in 20 years, and an almost 10% increase since the end of last year, when Milei took over.

“Milei has stayed true to his promise of taking a metaphorical “chainsaw” to public spending.”

Milei says this is a necessary pain the country must endure before things get better. But there’s no evidence for this. If anything, the worst is likely yet to come, considering that Milei’s drastic fiscal austerity will probably lead to a further economic contraction amid already-floundering growth. No wonder the IMF has already slashed Argentina’s GDP forecast for 2024.

So why, Milei’s defenders might weigh in, does a recent poll show that a majority of Argentines continue to support him? Because, as the Argentine journalist Lautaro Grinspan explains, Milei “has placed responsibility for households’ mounting economic difficulties on his ‘inheritance’ from Peronist predecessors, and the blame game seems to be working”. But for how long? After all, resistance is already mounting, with workers going on strike in several sectors and anti-Milei mobilisations filling the streets. If his policies don’t start to deliver results soon, Milei could find himself with a full-blown social uprising on his hands, similar to the one that shook the country in 2001.

Faced with such disorder, Milei has already started to crack down on the right to protest — including proposals to identify protestors and then bill them for the cost of mobilising security forces and even remove them from welfare support lists. Some fear even harsher forms of repression. According to one lawmaker in Milei’s coalition, protestors should be dealt with with either “prison or bullets”.

More than anything, the threat served as a telling reminder that while neoliberals like Milei often claim to be libertarian and anti-statist, in practice neoliberalism requires powerful, even authoritarian, state apparatuses to impose its logic on society — and stifle any challenge to the dominant order. It’s no coincidence that the extreme free-market experiments pursued in Latin America in the late 20th century relied on extensive state terror. Nor is it surprising that Milei has repeatedly sought to downplay the crimes of the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, and which was responsible for the death and “disappearance” of an estimated 30,000 people — though it certainly calls into question the president’s commitment to “freedom”.

Moreover, contrary to Milei’s claims, many of the economic problems faced by Argentina can be traced back to the legacy of those policies — not to “communism” or statism. Even after the end of the military rule, several Argentine governments experimented with “pro-market” neoliberal policies. Under Carlos Menem, who ruled from 1989 to 1999, Argentina “flexibilised” the labour market, deregulated virtually every sector of the economy, privatised several state-owned companies, liberalised international trade, pegged the peso to the dollar, and took on large amounts of dollar-denominated debt. Those policies dealt a serious blow to the country’s competitiveness, eventually resulting in a deep recession that the government was unable to overcome. The experiment ended catastrophically with the financial collapse of 2001.

 

This was followed by a decade-long economic recovery and boom, buoyed by strongly redistributive policies. The subsequent slowdown led the conservative Mauricio Macri to attempt to rekindle the economy by once again embracing market-oriented reforms — and taking on more dollar-denominated debt. When the country’s foreign-debt obligations ballooned to unsustainable levels and the peso collapsed against the US dollar in 2018, Macri made the questionable decision to take another $50 billion loan from the IMF — its largest-ever credit package.

To make matters more precarious, in recent years, the economic impact of the pandemic, the rise in commodity prices and then the Federal Reserve’s post-pandemic interest rate hikes have all contributed to the massive inflationary surge. Thus we can see that Argentina’s problems aren’t rooted solely in “excessive government spending” and “money printing” — in fact, Argentina’s fiscal balance was actually in line with the regional average throughout the decade to 2022, and last year was smaller than the US’s — but more specifically in the country’s over-reliance on dollar-denominated debt and an outward-oriented development model. It goes without saying that further tying the Argentine economy to the American one by going for full-blown dollarisation would only make things worse. It would mean fully submitting Argentina to American monetary governance — though it would, of course, once again make the country “safe” for global capital.

 

But if this is true, why are so many MAGA-conservatives attracted to Milei? It’s partly down to the growing importance of culture-war issues in the formation of people’s political outlook: Milei’s non-conformist stance on issues such as vaccines and climate change automatically makes him “based” regardless of what his economic policies may be.

In more strictly political-economic terms, however, it shows that conservatives, particularly in the US, still very much live in the shadow of Reaganism: they adhere to a cartoonish form of libertarianism, where the state is the source of all evil and oppression, while the self-regulating market — or “true capitalism” — is framed as a promised land capable of delivering freedom and prosperity.

equally authoritarian, socially destructive market-based logics. By contrast, as Karl Polanyi observed, the true “conservative” alternative consists in “embedding” the economy in society, in subordinating it to its citizens’ material needs, beliefs, values, customs and traditions — in other words, the opposite of Milei’s authoritarian libertarianism.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Fazi
 is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is THE COVID CONSENSUS, co-authored with Toby Green.


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Zionists SLAM Oscar Speech

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Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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The War on Consciousness: Manufacturing Stupidity

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Eric Arnow
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Diplomacy for Dummies

Recently, a stark example of the war on consciousness in the West was on full display:

https://www.rt.com/russia/592298-polyansky-western-diplomacy-primitive/

Russians have had to dumb down their speeches at the UN so other countries can understand them, deputy representative Dmitry Polyansky has said

I don’t know what media you consume for your news, but the recent press conference by President Joe Biden, where he refers to President El-Sisi as the president of Mexico comes to mind. Mexico is on the US border. President El Sisi is the current leader of Egypt, which is what…5000 miles away from the US East Coast.


Well, we can sort of excuse Mr. Biden, who is now an octogenarian for not being as sharp as a tack. Although I regularly read The Greanville Post, by editor Patrice Greanville. (He's 84).

Or watch interviews with former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, who participated in USA/USSR arms control negotiations 50 years ago.

Seems like, some people become very wise as they get older, and some people get dumber….I mean an Arab leader coming from Mexico???

Then, we can look to the chief architects of US foreign policy such as Secretary of State, Tony Blinken. As an arch Russophobe, cites his stepfather who was saved from a Nazi concentration camp by the US. But it seems that Blinken has a selective or defective memory:

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/what-tony-blinken-conveniently-left-out-his-family%E2%80%99s-story-174288

Blinken told his stepfather’s story as a tale of one-sided U.S. beneficence, but Samuel Pisar remembers it differently: “I was saved by the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the turning point of the war, and the Red Army offensive,” he said in a 2010 interview with Russian media outlet RIA Novosti. “For me, during the Second World War, Russia was a savior. I consider my saviors to be the Russian and American armies. You can criticize Stalin, the Gulag, and other things that happened in Russia from 1920 to 1930, but the heroism, sacrifice, and victory of Russia in the war against Fascism cannot be questioned. It’s sacred.”

How the US Consciousness Became Corrupted and Degenerate

Krishramurti on the Crisis in Consciousness 

What the world is now with all the misery conflict destructive brutality aggression and so on..man he still as he was still brutal violent aggressive acquisitive competitive and he is built a society along these lines. ..what we are trying you know all these discussions and talks here…is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the Mind, not accept things as they are but to understand it to go into it to examine it give your heart and your mind with everybody think that you have to find out a way of living differently


My Dinner with Andre –a totalitarian system based on money, with people creating their own prison. 

‘I mean are we just like bored spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking well what can I do?

Okay yes we’re bored we’re all bored now but has it ever occurred to you that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating  unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks and it’s not just a question of individual survival but that somebody who’s bored is asleep and somebody who’s asleep will not say no.

See I keep meeting these people I mean uh just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire he’s a Swedish physicist Gustav bjor Strand and he told me that he no longer watches television he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines he’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel the we’re living in some kind of orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot…

When I was at Findhorn I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington lobbying to save the Redwoods he’s 84 years old he always travels with a Backpackers he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow and when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, ‘where are you from’.

And I said New York. He said ‘ah New York yes  that’s a very interesting place do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do and I said oh yes and he said why do you think they don’t leave I gave him different banal theories. He said, ‘Oh I don’t think it’s that way at all, I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves and the inmates are the guards and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built.

‘They’ve built their own prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result they no longer have having been lobotomized the capacity to leave leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison.’


 

Examples of Brazen Contempt for the Public Consciousness  

If You Believe the Government, ‘You’re Stupid’

Americans are taught the myth that their democracy is safeguarded by an independent press. But the government and other powerful entities have long mastered the art of manipulating the major media, even to the point of bluntly telling reporters the facts of life, as Jon Schwarz recalls.

By Jon Schwarz

Everyone who watched John Miller’s “60 Minutes” segment on the NSA should follow it up with this story involving Morley Safer, who, at 82 years old, is still a correspondent at “60 Minutes”:

In August, 1965 Safer appeared in what became one of most famous TV segments of the Vietnam War, showing U.S. troops setting fire to all the huts in a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.

Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.

A year later in 1966, Safer wrote an article about what he’d seen firsthand during a visit to Vietnam by Arthur Sylvester, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (i.e., the head of Pentagon PR). Sylvester met with reporters for U.S. news outlets at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon:

There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand, to say something that would jar us. He said:

“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.

A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”

“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.

An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian [a press officer based in Vietnam], about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?, stupid.”

One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam,a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea, suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:

“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”

At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers. [For the full article by Safer, see below.]

There are several significant aspects to this:

— A top U.S. official was honest enough to tell reporters: look, we lie to you constantly and you’re a moron if you believe anything we say. He also honestly expressed his total contempt for them and intention to manipulate news coverage by dealing directly with their management and employers.

Moreover, Sylvester (who before going to work for the Pentagon had been the Washington correspondent for the Newark News) put his beliefs into practice at key moments of history. He lied about what the U.S. knew about Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and personally told the key lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident (listen to him here).

And word was passed to Safer’s superiors at CBS that “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.”

This is such important information about how politics and the media work that it should be taught to everyone in second grade. It’s not.

— Even if regular people don’t know this story, you’d expect it to be famous within the media, and particularly famous at “60 Minutes.” You might even imagine that “If you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid” would be spray-painted on the walls of the “60 Minutes” offices. But if the performance of John Miller and his producers on the NSA segment is anything to go by, that is not the case.

It’s hard to imagine what more the U.S. government could do to get reporters to distrust it, and all for naught. John Miller likely has an office feet away from someone who’s been told by a top U.S. official that reporters are morons if they believe anything top U.S. officials say. Miller’s response? Believe everything top U.S. officials say. (Of course, given that Miller is recreating Sylvester’s career path, it may also simply be that he agrees with Sylvester on the necessity of the press being handmaidens of government.)

— Even if reporters have forgotten this story, you’d expect that it would be Exhibit A for left-wing media critics and repeated so often that it would be common knowledge in those limited circles. Yet the forces of forgetting in the U.S. are so powerful that I’d never encountered it, and I’m probably one of America’s top 25 consumers of left-wing media criticism.

I can’t find any references to it by Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Robert Parry, Robert McChesney or Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. (William Blum does tell part of what happened in his book Killing Hope, and the key sentence appears
in some online collections of quotes about the media.)

To make it even more surprising, Safer’s story was well-known enough at the time that Indiana’s anti-war Senator Vance Hartke referred to it on the Senate floor as “the now famous article.” And references to it sometimes appeared in books about Vietnam during the late Sixties and early Seventies. But after that it evaporated.

So if something this significant can disappear from history, truly only god knows what else has been thrown down the memory hole. To try to pull it back, I’m putting the entire text of the article online for the first time below, and adding the gist to Safer’s Wikipedia page.

I’m also going to try to get John Miller to answer a straightforward question: has Morley Safer ever told him this story?

Jon Schwarz is editor of MichaelMoore.com and was research producer for ‘Capitalism: A Love Story.’ He’s also contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Saturday Night Live and NPR. [Reprinted with the author’s permission.]

Click here for an image of the article as it appeared in the Southern Illinoisan on Sept. 1, 1966.

‘Look, If You Think Any American Official Is Going to Tell You the Truth, Then You’re Stupid’

By Morley Safer
Of the Columbia Broadcasting System

There has been no war quite like it. Never have so many words been churned out, never has so much l6-mm film been exposed. And never has the reporting of a story been so much a part of the story itself.

This has been true whether you are reporting television’s first war, as I have been, or for one of the print media. Washington has been critical of American newsmen in Saigon almost continuously since 1961. That criticism has manifested itself in a number of ways,from the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions to orders to put certain correspondents on ice to downright threat.

As a friend of mine puts It, “The brass wants you to get on the team.”

To the brass, getting on the team means simply giving the United States government line in little more than handout. It means accepting what you are told without question. At times it means turning your back on facts.

I know of few reporters in Viet Nam who have “gotten on the team.” The fact is, the American people are getting an accurate picture of the war in spite of attempts by various officials,mostly in Washington,to present the facts in a different way. That is why certain correspondents have been vilified, privately and publicly.

By late winter of 1964-1965 the war was clearly becoming an American war. And with it came an American responsibility for providing and reporting facts. American officials thus were able to deal directly with reporters. The formality of “checking it out with the Vietnamese” ceased to be relevant.

In Washington the burden of responsibility of giving, controlling and managing the war news from Viet Nam fell to,and remains with,one man: Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.

By early summer of 1965 the first set of ground rules had been laid down for reporting battles and casualties. There was no censorship but a very loose kind of honor system that put the responsibility for not breaking security on the shoulders of correspondents. The rules were vague and were therefore continually broken.

For military and civilian officials in Viet Nam there was another set of rules,rather another honor system that was not so much laid down as implied. “A policy of total candor” is a phrase used by Barry Zorthian, minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Zorthian is what Time calls “the information czar” in Viet Nam.

The breaking of the vague ground rules was something that annoyed everyone. Correspondents were rocketed by their editors, and the military in Viet Nam felt that Allied lives were being endangered. So in midsummer, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to Saigon and brought Sylvester with him, we all looked forward to the formulation of a clear-cut policy. Sylvester was to meet the press in an informal session to discuss mutual problems. The meeting was to take the vagueness out of the ground rules.

The Sylvester meeting was surely one of the most disheartening meetings between reporters and a news manager ever held.

It was a sticky July evening. Inside Zorthian’s villa it was cool. But Zorthian was less relaxed than usual. He was anxious for Sylvester to get an idea of the mood of the news corps. There had been some annoying moments in previous weeks that had directly involved Sylvester’s own office. In the first B-52 raids, Pentgaon releases were in direct contradiction to what had actually happened on the ground in Viet Nam.

There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand,to say something that would jar us. He said:

“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.

A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”

“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.

An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian,about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?,stupid.”

One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam,a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea,suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:

“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”

At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.

A correspondent for one of the New York papers began a question. He never got beyond the first few words. Sylvester interrupted:

“Aw, come on, What does someone in New York care about the war in Viet Nam?”

We got down to immediate practical matters,the problems of communication, access to military planes, getting out to battles.

“Do you guys want to be spoon-fed? Why don’t you get out and cover the war?”

It was a jarring and insulting remark. Most of the people in that room has spent as much time on actual operations as most GI’s.

The relationship between reporters and public information officers in Saigon, or the other hand, has been a good, healthy one. The relationship in the field is better, and in dealing with the men who fight the war it is very good indeed.

ABOUT THE ARTICLE

Arthur Sylvester, assistant secretary of defense in charge of public affairs, said Wednesday that no government official should lie when giving out information about the country.

He said it was all right to withhold information to safeguard the country. He was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This article is one correspondent’s report of Sylvester’s statement about truth in public affairs one year ago.

THIS article is excerpted from “Dateline 1966: Covering War,” a publication of the Overseas Press Club of America.

https://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/18/if-you-believe-the-goverment-youre-stupid/


From the book The Game of Death, by Albert E Kahn and Michael Sayer

Deliberately dumbing down the population starting with public education

III. WAR ON THE MIND

BY ALBERT E KAHN

Chapter 3 from The Game of Death

IN THE early summer of 1949 an extraordinary document, which bode portentous changes in the lives of countless young Americans, was published in the United States. Entitled American Education and International Tensions and printed in the form of a 54-page booklet, the document consisted of a report issued under the auspices of the National Education Association, the largest and most influential educational body in the country.

The report advanced the startling thesis that the time had come to revamp completely the traditional function of the nation’s schools as institutions of objective instruction and free inquiry, and to convert them into agencies of political indoctrination and instruments for producing un-questioning adherence to the official policies of the U. S. Government. (And its semi-official doctrine, capitalism—Ed).

CIA and the role of manipulating culture

https://www.thecollector.com/abstract-expressionism-waging-a-cultural-cold-war-2/

The Cold War was very ideologically charged: it was a battle between opposing political systems. It is therefore only natural that the spread of culture played such an important role. The CIA employed the most effective sort of propaganda, the sort which influences the minds of people without them realizing it. Eventually, their covert methods made Abstract Expressionism so popular that it became quite difficult for an artist to find success working in any other style.

They want to destroy social consciousness by eliminating Socialist Realism as an art genre.

 

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt-1909623

 

When the US government established the CIA in 1947, it included a division known as the Propaganda Assets Inventory, a branch of psychological warfare intended to boost pro-American messaging during the Cold War. In the following excerpt from the new book ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History, author Jennifer Dasal explores how the intelligence agency curated exhibitions of abstract art to wage its ideological war. 

Further examples of Lies by ‘The Empire of Lies’

  • Merciless Red skinned savages: Howard Zinn
  • Spanish American War—“You supply the photograph and I’ll supply the war.” “Remember the Maine”
  • WWI Lusitania, Huns stabbing babies. Edward Bernays—getting women to smoke. Then getting them to go to war.
  • WWII Pearl Harbor was anticipated but people were told it was unprovoked.
  • Beginning of Cold War—After Germany was defeated, attention turned towards defeating the USSR. So the support for Russia during WWII suddenly switched to anti Communism.
  • Operation Unthinkable. Winston Churchill praised Stalin during WWII, until England was no longer in danger, then turned against Russia, its original adversary.
  • Vietnam War—Gulf of Tonkin “North Vietnam attacked our ship” Except that it didn’t
  • First Gulf War. “Babies thrown out of incubators”
  • Second Iraq War Weapons of Mass Destruction. Didn’t exist
  • Afghan War 4 incompetent pilots outsmart the entire US airforce and take down 3 buildings.
  • Libya War—fake news about Libyan soldiers given viaga, Chinese military budget vs US.
  • Ukraine War started with the coup against Yanukovych, massacre in Odessa unreported, attacks for 8 years against Donbass unreported. Russian draft treaties to get Nato to honor its treaties spurned, with missiles duplicating Cuban Missile crisis minutes away from Russia. But war is “unprovoked”.

Past and Present Truth tellers:

Here are some suggestions of people who told the truth:

  • Harriet Tubman,
  • Mark Twain—Huckleberry Finn, etc. of the Anti imperialist League,
  • IF Stone,
  • George Seldes,
  • Ida Tarbell,
  • anti war newspapers at US military bases during the Vietnam War,
  • Mark Lane, Rush to Judgement, and numerous independent analyses of JFK assassination.
  • Manufacturing Consent,
  • Peoples History of the United States,
  • The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush.
  • Crossing the Rubicon, by Mike Ruppert
  • Books by Albert E Kahn

The Key question: Whenever we get a news report, ask two questions: 1. Really? And 2. Who benefits?

https://thegrayzone.com/

www.informationclearinghouse.info

www.consortiumnews.com

www.globalresearch.ca

www.greanvillepost.com

https://www.youtube.com/@ClassWarFilms

Creators:

The Duran

Caitlin Johnstone

Jeff J. Brown

Aaron Mate

Gabor Mate

Norman Finkelstein

Michael Hudson

Ben Norton Geopolitical Economy Report

Julian Assange

And many journalists like Gary Webb, Mike Ruppert

 

How to Win the War on Consciousness–Develop Critical Thinking

 

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an03/an03.065.than.html

Harking back 2500 years, we see that this is not a new problem. The story goes that the Buddha was traveling around India, and came to a village of the Kalama people. There were confused because sometimes some guru would show up and explain why they should follow him. Later on, another guru would come to town, and tell the people that the first guru was wrong and that they should follow this guy.

So when Siddhartha Gotama (the Buddha) came to their town, they asked his opinion. Rather than telling them ‘The Truth’, in response to this question, he answered the following:

Which of these venerable brahmans & contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which ones are lying?”

“Of course you are uncertain, Kalamas. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’

When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering’— then you should abandon them.

Note by the translator:

Traditions are not to be followed simply because they are traditions. Reports (such as historical accounts or news) are not to be followed simply because the source seems reliable. One’s own preferences are not to be followed simply because they seem logical or resonate with one’s feelings.

Instead, any view or belief must be tested by the results it yields when put into practice; and — to guard against the possibility of any bias or limitations in one’s understanding of those results — they must further be checked against the experience of people who are wise. The ability to question and test one’s beliefs in an appropriate way is called appropriate attention.

The ability to recognize and choose wise people as mentors is called having admirable friends. According to Iti 16-17, these are, respectively, the most important internal and external factors for attaining the goal of the practice.

Think for Yourself–Put No One’s Head Above Your Own

In other words, Think for yourselves, and seek multiple sources, such as those noted above (but not only these) in order to decide what is true or false, or what is right or wrong.

Peace and Enlightenment Store

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About the Author

Please read the author's complete bio. It's a journey filled with memorable, edifying and surprising moments. Much to be learned from Eric Arnow's experiences in search of truth. 

Read it HERE. 

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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