LIES & PROPAGANDA

JACQUES PAUWELS—The Revolution that exploded in 1789 clearly reflected the great and traumatic class contradictions that characterized the Ancien Régime. The majority of the people, the peasants in the countryside and, in the city, the patrician haute bourgeoisie as well as the plebeians, above all the Parisian artisans who would be known as the “sans-culottes”, rose up against the upper class, the elite or “establishment”, consisting of the nobility and the high ranks of the clergy, lined up behind the king. Members of the bourgeoisie took over the leadership of the revolutionary movement, but the sans-culottes performed most if not all the revolutionary heavy lifting. In the countryside, the peasants made a significant contribution to the revolutionary cause by attacking the noble seigneurs in their castles. After the cancellation of the onerous feudal obligations the peasants had resented so much, however, tranquillity returned to the countryside. Henceforth, revolutionary action would take place mostly, though not exclusively, in Paris.

DUBAI: This week, The New York Times ran a full page ad that condemned part-Palestinian models Gigi and Bella Hadid and British-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa for showing solidarity with the people of Palestine. “Bella, Gigi and Dua, Hamas calls for a second holocaust. Condemn them now (sic),” read the headline of the advertisement, which took the form of a letter to the three prominent stars. The advert was organized, produced and paid for by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the head of the World Values Network.

The ad, which ran on Saturday in the main section of the newspaper, named Lipa and the Hadid sisters as “mega-influencers” who have “accused Israel of ethnic cleansing” and “vilified the Jewish State.” 

ALAN MACLEOD—Maher rose from being an “edgy,” opinionated comedian to becoming one of the most influential and recognizable faces in our media. His political talk show, Real Time With Bill Maher, has been on HBO since 2003, spanning 17 seasons with over 500 episodes to date. Real Time continues to be one of the most popular shows on cable TV, drawing in more than 4 million viewers per episode, according to a new New York Times interview (9/30/19),

GLENN GREENWALD—This is an obvious scam — they have not “independently confirmed” anything but rather merely acted as servants to the same lying security state agents who planted the original false story — but they do it over and over, creating the deceitful perception that a fake story has been “confirmed” by multiple outlets, thus bolstering its credibility in the public mind. It was the favored tactic for spreading debunked Russiagate frauds and is still used. One of the most vivid examples occurred in December, 2017, when CNN falsely reported what it hyped as “a major bombshell”: that Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive.

FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—This ostensible sloppiness of Russian intelligence agencies contradicts separate US media claims that the Kremlin just launched a spellbinding cyber-assault on the heart of American government departments and corporations.

In any case, Navalny reportedly succeeded in his “sting” operation against the FSB by using sophisticated electronic mimicking of the agency’s phone line and posing as a senior member of the Russian national security council who was demanding a briefing on the alleged assassination and how it failed. We are led to believe the FSB officer, who is named, volunteered the information that Novichok was applied to Navalny’s underpants while he was staying at a hotel in the hours before his flight to Tomsk on August 20.