Agents provocateurs and the manipulation of the radical left

Another important dispatch from The Greanville Post. Be sure to share it widely.

BY EMILE SCHEPERS • People's World


A burning police car in Toronto's financial district during the G20 Summit, June 26, 2010. Black bloc provocations played a major role in demonstrations at the summit.


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he far-right surge arising in the wake of the election of Donald Trump includes various shades of fascism. This is being abetted by the president and other major political leaders. It has led to a many-fronted crisis to which we need to prioritize effective resistance.

To be effective such resistance must do two things. First, it must aim to protect the sections of our society which are being targeted by the right-wing surge. African Americans, other minorities, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, the poor, and the natural environment are all in the crosshairs of the right. Total solidarity of all with all is essential.

Second, effective resistance has to turn the politics of the situation around so that there is a truly massive, society-wide rejection of fascism and the right in the country, in the elections, in the legislative field, on the cultural front, and in every other possible arena. The 2017 and 2018 elections are thus tremendously important.

Right now, there is considerable discussion going on about the best way to do all these things. Tactics that make us feel good because they are exhilarating are not necessarily the same as effective tactics. They can, in fact, be precisely the opposite.

History teaches us is that the ruling class, the state and non-state institutions it controls, as well as the right have learned the political judo whereby the left’s actions may be turned around and used to strengthen the right and weaken the left.

Specifically, we should learn from the history of the agent provocateur, a specialist in manipulating conflict so as to benefit our enemies. Agents provocateurs are not merely enemy spies within the people’s movement. The provocateur has an even more sinister mission, which sometimes has deadly results.

What the provocateur frequently provokes is actions that either discredit the left or the people’s movement in the eyes of large numbers of people, or which entrap the unwary into acts that will allow police to pounce, accuse activists of plotting violent or other anti-social acts, and then lock them up.

Agents provocateurs have been known for well over a century, in many countries; the breed was especially rife in tsarist Russia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the United States, agents provocateurs often targeted labor union organizing efforts. Since the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, there are many accounts of the FBI, other police bodies, the military, and private right-wing vigilante groups sending agents provocateurs into people’s organizations with the purpose of dividing, disrupting, and discrediting them and then laying them open to arrest and prosecution, or worse.

More radical than thou

In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a great outpouring of grassroots rejection of the policies, domestic and international, of the Cold War. The Civil Rights Movement, plus the movement against the Vietnam War, brought millions into the streets protesting courageously against the many injustices of our society.

The Cold Warriors and the ruling class did not like this, as they saw their interests threatened. So they developed open and covert strategies for undermining the new radicalism as well as the “old left” (communists and socialists). The idea was to make sure that the left did not continue to win over the support of the mass of the people of the United States to progressive and ultimately, revolutionary, socialist ideas.

The “new left” tendencies that arose at this time included many positive features but had some dangerous flaws also.

One flaw was that too often, a fetish was made of the absolute right of anybody involved in an organization to express his or her opinion no matter how divergent from the main goals of the organization, or to engage in any activity which was “radical” regardless of whether it helped or harmed the cause. This extreme liberalism laid many organizations open to manipulation of some of their weakest elements by agents provocateurs.

There was also a tendency to compete to see who was most radical. The competition for revolutionary “cred” was a godsend for agents provocateurs, who actively encouraged such competition. The lack of connections, especially among campus-based white radicals, to the working class and its politics exacerbated this trend by eliminating an important reality check.

Picking off leaders and undermining public support

There also tended to be a cult of leadership within many radical organizations which put their leaders into a vulnerable position in which they could be targeted for neutralization so as to undermine the whole movement. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, for instance, put a huge amount of effort into neutralizing leaders.

The agents provocateurs were deployed in such a way as to discredit the leaders and their organizations, to create splits in the movement, and in some cases to provoke violence which would lead to physical elimination of leaders plus a societal repudiation of the movement.

The 1960s campus-based movement against the Vietnam War was a top target for agents provocateurs.  There were several at work, but one, known as “Tommy the Traveler” was particularly memorable. He, too, concentrated on enticing impressionable young would-be “revolutionaries” to commit acts that would divide the movement while landing them in jail.

Hoover, a crusading anti-communist and paranoid racist, paid particular attention to disrupting the highly-effective African American people’s movement, often employing agents provocateurs to create friction within and between liberation organizations. This led to several murders.

In 1967, for example, agents provocateurs, especially a certain William O’Neal, described in a Nation article as “infatuated with weapons,” played a role in the police murder of Illinois Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. Hampton had been suspicious of O’Neal because of his violent talk, but others did not see through him, with tragic results. O’Neal’s promotion of crackpot violent schemes should have been a giveaway. When O’Neal set up Hampton and Clark for a brutal murder by police acting under the orders of Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan, the perpetrators were able to convince sectors of the public that the Panthers were prone to violence and shot first, which was untrue.

Another example was the crime of Cerro Maravilla, in Puerto Rico, on July 25, 1978.

An agent provocateur, Alejandro González Malavé, working undercover for the Puerto Rican police, enticed two idealistic young supporters of independence for Puerto Rico into a reckless act that cost them their lives. One was Carlos Enrique Soto Areví, the son of one of Puerto Rico’s most important literary figures, the novelist Pedro Juan Soto. The second was a self-taught worker, Arnaldo Dario Rosado. Both were on fire with indignation at the colonialist treatment that Puerto Rico received at the hands of the United States (treatment which continues today). They wanted to demonstrate this indignation in some dramatic way.

Their lack of practical political experience made them easy prey for González Malavé. He persuaded them that a noble act for their homeland would be to destroy some communications towers on the top of a hill called “Cerro Maravilla.” This was supposed to express solidarity with some imprisoned Puerto Rican independence fighters.

The three kidnapped a taxi driver and forced him to drive them up to Cerro Maravilla. But when they arrived, they found they had been led into a police ambush. As the armed police approached, González Malavé identified himself as an agent, but Soto and Rosado were killed, and the “official” story was put out that they had been shot in a firefight with the cops.

The right-wing, pro-statehood governor at the time, Carlos Romero Barceló, hailed the police as heroes, and the FBI helpfully pitched in to support the Puerto Rican Justice Department with the cover-up.

However, the police had left a “loose end,” namely the taxi driver, who spoke to the press and revealed that in fact González Malavé was a police agent and that the two young men were still alive when he left the place. The police had entrapped the two men, then murdered them after they surrendered.

This became a big scandal, and eventually led to prosecutions and the defeat of Romero Barceló’s party in the next elections. But the use of agents provocateurs to divide and isolate the Puerto Rican left has been unrelenting, both before and after that incident.

Disrupting today’s movements

Such agent provocateur tactics surfaced again during the protests against the Iraq War, and in the “Occupy” movement. In each case, glib charismatic strangers wormed their way into protest organizations, and then entrapped inexperienced young radicals to get involved in plans, which were sometimes really just talk, to engage in violence. A typical case is that of the “Cleveland bomb plot” of 2012. Another is the San Francisco Mission District riot of May 2012, when a mysterious black-clad contingent hijacked part of a peaceful “Occupy” demonstration and turned it toward random violence. In both cases, the purpose of the provocateurs was to discredit the movement in the eyes of the public, which otherwise might have been receptive to Occupy’s “99 percent versus one percent” message.

This kind of manipulation still continues by all accounts. As before, the purpose is to discredit the movement, divide it, deprive it of allies, and set up leaders and organizations for repressive action while making sure that this repression will not produce a wave of public indignation, as happened with the Cerro Maravilla case.

The right and the ruling class always try to portray these people’s movements as violent, because this is the alchemy best suited to turn public opinion against them. This is the main lesson to be learned from the agent provocateur experiences of the past.

In the conditions of our country today, injecting violent tactics into the mass movement of protest undermines that movement and plays the enemy’s game.

Loose talk about violence can be just as dangerous. This danger is multiplied by the development of online communications and social media—there are no secrets now.

Hijacking other people’s protest actions to “move them to a higher level,” meaning toward violent confrontations, is really a dirty kind of pseudo-left politics.

What is needed now is to build the movement into a great wave of rejection against the reactionary policies of the ruling class, the right, and the Trump administration and its allies. Let us work on that basis and avoid tactics that undermine it.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emile Schepers
Emile Schepers  is a veteran civil and immigrant rights activist. Emile Schepers was born in South Africa and has a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University. He has worked as a researcher and activist in urban, working-class communities in Chicago since 1966. He is active in the struggle for immigrant rights, in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and a number of other issues. He now writes from Northern Virginia.

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Dr. Steve Turley: Analyzing the worldwide blowback against globalization and its secular aristocracy

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AN AGE OF STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?


World crises often force strange displacements in the tectonic plates separating various political outlooks, and so it is with this turbulent age, in which globalists do their best to dumb down and sow massive confusion among the populace. People opposing this fetid excrescence are coming now from both the right (traditional conservatives) and the genuine left (not the centrist-right addled-brained liberals who normally mass around phony imperialist formations like the Democrats, yea it IS confusing). Many traditional conservatives (and libertarians, like Dr Ron Paul) are found fighting the neoliberal project, and its offshoot of endless wars and inexorable immiseration of the masses. It is in that framework that we find one of them, Dr Steve Turley, who, it should be noted, still very much supports many things that remain anathema to traditional leftists. That said, his critique of the US-led empire is healthy, lucid and spot on, and that's why we we bring it to your attention. The moment requires we focus and prioritise our enemies by their degree of malignancy, we must look at the broader and more important issues that bind us, instead of the less urgent issues that separate us, and which, in terms of practical politics, have no way of being resolved before the planet collapses, and perhaps do not need to be resolved, merely declared part of a wise truce between the disputants. Mental agility and flexibility is a necessary condition to dispose of the chief enemy theatening us all with depraved barbarism.—PG


Published on Dec 22, 2018

Find out why the Yellow Vest Uprising is spreading all over the world, even Taiwan!!!


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Turley (Ph.D., Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and blogger at TurleyTalks.com. He is the author of Awakening Wonder: A Classical Guide to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty and The Ritualized Revelation of the Messianic Age: Washings and Meals in Galatians and 1 Corinthians. Steve is a teacher of Theology and Rhetoric at Tall Oaks Classical School in Newark, DE, and Professor of Fine Arts at Eastern University.

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Revolutionary wisdom

Words from an Irish patriot—

 

It’s Brillig in America

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Defeating the Jabberwock that torments Americans and the world will be impossible until the population realizes who the enemy really is.

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ewis Carroll knew nonsense.  He pretty much invented the verse version.  We, who live in a country in which nonsense defines national behavior, are effectively blind to that reality, judging by our universal acceptance of it.

We’ve been force-fed bullshit by ruling elites forever and, though bullshit is not nonsense, it’s the perfect cover for it.  Nonsense, by definition, has no rational basis and makes no sense.  Bullshit, in contrast, is often coherent and plausible and disseminated by authority. It has caused Americans to embrace reams of pernicious nonsense immeasurably ruinous to them.

Goebbels assertion that the Big Lie, repeated and robustly defended, could  enlist a people against itself was proven for us by Reagan’s “morning in America” and Obama’s “hope and change” hustles, classics of bullshit, that enabled the infliction of much sanctimonious idiocy on H.L.’s Booboisie.

Carroll’s masterwork–The Jabberwocky–opens with this couplet:

Twas Brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the Borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.

Given where we are today, to paraphrase Reagan, it’s Brillig in America.

This has much to do with the Buffoon-in-Chief, yes, but his is only a part, and not the most grievous, in the complex of existential idiocy under which Americans ignorantly labor.  To take the greatest, most odious examples of the screaming nonsense that encumbers us, start with what’s laughingly referred to by the Cognoscenti as “monetary policy”, viz.:

1) Congress must “borrow” from somewhere the money it spends and rake it back in taxes to “pay” for services.  Perfect nonsense.  Relentless bullshit persuaded us this is so.  It is not.  Congress creates money from nothing because it’s empowered to do so, taxes aren’t “collected” but are written off  to diminish the extant money supply, and they “pay” for absolutely nothing.

2) Social Security and Medicare will go broke very soon if we don’t cut them because payroll taxes won’t pay their increasing cost.  Purest nonsense.  Congress could sustain and augment them forever if it would, without increasing taxes since taxes don’t “pay” for them.  The will of Congress  determines which programs are funded and which are not.  It has always lavished money on elite financial entities with the closest ties to it through baldfaced bribery.  That group does not include The American People.

3) The world is full of nations that are evil, while we are not, and one of them is always determined to attack, invade and destroy us, so we must spend money that could make our education, health care, infrastructure, and natural environment the envy of the world, on war and preparing for it.  Utter nonsense.  No nation since 1812, has had any such intention.  A roaring torrent of bullshit from our owners has enabled the poisonous Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex–Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman–and our coddled, stupidly generalled, over-teched military monstrosity to extract the life from us.

These are just the prime examples of the sick nonsense that rules us.

We’ve been force-fed bullshit by ruling elites forever and, though bullshit is not nonsense, it’s the perfect cover for it. Nonsense, by definition, has no rational basis and makes no sense. Bullshit, in contrast, is often coherent and plausible and disseminated by authority.

Carroll’s Jabberwocky had a hero and a triumphant, victorious ending.  In our moral paralysis, we can’t look to heroes because their existence is another bullshit story that masks the nonsense we’ve been persuaded to live in.  What may resonate for us with the jolly madness of it, though, is that we have our own Jabberwock, our own hideous, ghastly monster, that lives by devouring us with the “claws that catch” and the “jaws that bite”, regardless of how brainlessly unaware of it we continue to be.

It is that tiny upper echelon of the Capitalist Cabal that owns and operates our criminal government like a Mafia racket.  It is that vicious, diabolical, unelected cadre of warlocks, ghouls and vampires that, using scientifically tested, academically ponderous, legally impenetrable glossalalia, creates and disseminates the vast compendium of bullshit and mythology that enslaves and dehumanizes our citizenry, and lives, like a parasite, a remora, a metastatic cancer, on the blood and flesh of its own country.

Is redemption possible?  What can be done?  What must we do to save ourselves, our children, our future, cry the good, honorable, innocent ones, who feel the dark truth and are horrified by it.  Another of America’s bullshit mantras is that all problems have rational solutions.  Our Jabberwock will devour us unless we destroy it.  There’s no instruction manual for that.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net 

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Words from an Irish patriot—

 




UK and US Now Overtly Honor Al Qaeda


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Necessity knows no manners. As the masks fall off, the imperialists are hurriedly salvaging some of their chief terrorist assets to let them sow mayhem elsewhere.


[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he United Kingdom is resettling Al Qaeda’s Syrian medical unit, called the “White Helmets," as “refugees” in UK. The White Helmets organization is funded by UK’s MI6 and America’s CIA, and is headed by Raed Saleh, who was prohibited from visiting the US because he’s a terrorist. These jihadists won’t just have UK honors (and they already have: a Hollywood Oscar-winning ‘documentary’ full of lies about how ‘heroic’ the White Helmets are), but, presumably, they’ll also obtain UK citizenship.

"The Syria White Helmets Exposed as US UK Agents" is a 4-minute video about them. It’s an entirely accurate representation regarding their personnel and funding-sources. It even shows Al Qaeda in Syria executing a civilian; and, then, White Helmets — this ‘humanitarian organization’ — collecting his corpse just seconds later, as part of their ‘heroic’ work, for the US-and-allied invaders of Syria. The invading nations use Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch to train and lead ‘our’ boots-on-the-ground fighters to overthrow Syria’s secular, non-sectarian, Government, which is headed by the secular Shiite Bashar al-Assad. These US-Saudi-Israeli-allied proxy fundamentalist-Sunni-jihadist boots-on-the-ground do the actual dirty-work of killing people for their sponsoring aristocracies. In this particular instance the executioners are al-Nusra itself, which is Syria’s Al Qaeda branch, and in that video they have eliminated yet another person that the US and UK aristocracies want to be eliminated. The great independent investigative journalist Vanessa Beeley has written numerous articles (such as this) providing detailed documentation of how US and UK billionaires have funded the propaganda selling throughout the world the campaign to overthrow Syria’s Government. Though the invading countries call this a ‘civil war’ in Syria, it’s actually a war that wouldn’t even exist but for the work, since 2009, of CIA and MI6 and those others from Western ‘democracies’, which are making suckers of their own nations’ citizens — Americans, British, and citizens of the other invading countries — via their lying ‘news’-media, none of which will publish the truths that this 4-minute video is showing. So, the aristocrats’ publics are kept ignorant of such reality.

US State Department document dated 22 October 2010 — prior to the “Arab Spring” — and sent to all US Embassies in the Arab world, funneled funds to the Muslim Brotherhood and other “moderate Islamists” who sought regime-change, instead of “stability” there.

On 17 April 2011 (which was before Jeff Bezos owned) the Washington Post headlined with shocking honesty “US secretly backed Syrian opposition groups, cables released by WikiLeaks show”, and reported on the “Movement for Justice and Development [MJD], a London-based network of Syrian exiles. Classified US diplomatic cables show that the State Department has funneled as much as $6 million to the group since 2006 to operate the satellite channel and finance other activities inside Syria.” The cables had just been published by Wikileaks. Furthermore, “the cables indicate money was set aside at least through September 2010.” Obama had not cut off George W. Bush’s anti-Syrian aggression. There was no doubt that MJD was a regime-change-in-Syria organization: “The group, which is banned in Syria, openly advocates for Assad’s removal. US cables describe its leaders as ‘liberal, moderate Islamists’ who are former members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Then, on 21 November 2011, Sibel Edmonds at her Boiling Frogs Post bannered “BFP Exclusive: Syria- Secret US-NATO Training & Support Camp to Oust Current Syrian President” and she reported that,

The joint US-NATO secret training camp in the US air force base in Incirlik, Turkey, began operations in April-May 2011 to organize and expand the dissident base in Syria. Since then, in addition to Col. Riad al-Assad [no relation to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad], several other high-ranking Syrian military and intelligence officials have been added to operations’ headquarters in the US base. Weekly weapons smuggling operations have been carried out with full NATO-US participation since last May. The HQ also includes an information warfare division where US-NATO crafted communications are directed to dissidents in Syria via the core group of Syrian military and Intelligence defectors.

One Wikileaked document from the private-CIA firm Stratfor on 7 December 2011 reported the agent’s extensive discussions with the Pentagon and allied foreign militaries, and said that Special Operations Forces “teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground [in Syria] focused on recce missions and training opposition forces. One Air Force intel guy (US) said very carefully that there isn't much of a Free Syrian Army to train right now anyway.” (In other words, finding non-jihadists to take down Assad was proving to be far more difficult than had been anticipated.) Creating a Syrian civil war was then just a hope, and, “the idea ‘hypothetically’ is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns, try to break the back of the Alawite forces, elicit collapse from within.” But that hoped-for sectarian split-up of Syria likewise failed to materialize. Syria’s Government was too widely supported by the population. Consequently, US President Barack Obama made one other attempt to use the Muslim Brotherhood to get the ‘rebellion’ going. But this effort also failed. So, by the time of December 2012, Obama finally turned to al-Nusra. Here’s how that happened:

On 10 December 2012, the Telegraph bannered "Syrian rebels defy US and pledge allegiance to jihadi group” and reported that, “Rebel groups across Syria are defying the United States by pledging their allegiance to a group that Washington will designate today a terrorist organization for its alleged links to al-Qaeda. A total of 29 opposition groups, including fighting ‘brigades’ and civilian committees, have signed a petition calling for mass demonstrations in support of Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist group which the White House believes is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.”

As a direct consequence of that decision by the ‘moderate rebels’ whom the US was backing, Obama committed his Administration to use Al Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra, to train and lead the ‘moderate rebels’ (all jihadists other than ISIS), America’s proxy-fighters to bring down Syria’s Government. Obama continued that policy to the very end of his Presidency. His goal was to replace Assad with a dictator who would be controlled by the Saud family (who own Saudi Arabia), which family the CIA has been trying, ever since 1949, to place in control over Syria. Obama's successor, Donald Trump, continues this policy.

What is more despicable than this treachery, from our own governments, in our own era? Countries are being invaded by ours; these invaded countries haven’t invaded nor even threatened ours, but nonetheless we accept these invasions by ‘our’ governments and pay taxes to make these murderous invasions possible. Such aggressor-governments as ours do not actually represent us, but we tolerate them, decade after decade, as they slaughter people abroad, and blow up the US federal debt to pay for the aristocracy’s voracious and vicious operation of global conquest, which they call ‘humanitarian’, though they know it’s the opposite.

These governments represent only their respective aristocracies, the controlling owners of their international corporations. Like every aristocracy, each aristocracy portrays, as being ‘the nation’s enemy’, not itself (that aristocracy), but whatever foreign governments the given aristocracy aims to conquer. Each invading country’s ‘news’-media play differing segments of their own domestic population — Blacks, Whites, men, women, heterosexuals, homosexuals, etc. — against each other, so that none will blame the actually tiny number of aristocrats, who, behind the scenes, control that vile government and produce the problems (such as the bombings and jihadists that have produced the refugee-crisis in Europe) and the enormous ongoing injustices throughout the world.

The US and UK governments, and their Saudi and Israeli and other allies, don’t care about the welfare of their respective publics — the public who pay the taxes to support the given aristocracy’s invasions and military occupations and also its coups (that one having cost US taxpayers at least $5 billion and destroyed the target-country).

Even after lying (or “deceiving”) their publics into invading and occupying Iraq in 2003 on the basis of lies, and then repeating this in Libya in 2011 on the basis of lies, and then repeating it yet again now in Yemen on the basis of lies, the public seemingly don’t learn, they don’t repudiate all politicians and ‘news’-persons who have assisted this with their lies. After doing this a certain number of times, the publics themselves increasingly share in their respective aristocracy’s and its ‘news’-media’s evil. The public’s role becomes then no longer mere negligence, but increasingly also complicity, in what their aristocracy (and its lying ‘news’-media) is doing to the world. All that the aristocracy have to do is to fool their respective public by means of their ‘news’-media — the media these aristocrats own and control, just as they own and control the government itself. And thus those lies produce the public’s complicity, by making the public the aristocracy’s mental slaves working to support that aristocracy’s foreign ventures, which slaughter and displace millions of people and destroy their countries, by faked ‘civil wars’ etc. Our governments are so ‘humanitarian’, spreading ‘democracy’ — lies.

On September 24th, the UK Government headlined “News Story: White Helmets resettlement”, and reported: “The UK will support White Helmets volunteers and their families, who were evacuated from Syria, under the government’s Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.” These jihadist mercenaries are now ‘vulnerable persons’, no longer merely ‘heroes’. The Government can even claim this, in public. They’re then implying that their public are total fools. Will British citizens actually believe that these Al Qaeda affiliates are suitable to become their fellow-citizens?

How much longer will the populations in the invading countries continue to tolerate their aristocratic masters? Have things not gotten to the point where it is clear what those masters are doing? How much longer will their hypocrisy continue to succeed? Al Qaeda jihadists are now being invited, as ‘heroes’, to become UK citizens. Is that not enough? More than enough? Way too much?

The problem isn’t those Al Qaeda affiliates. It is the UK Government that’s doing this traitorous action. The Deep State, the international aristocracy, runs not only the US but the UK and many other governments, just like the CIA secretly protected and brought to America leading Nazis after World War II. This is typical of the lying and psychopathy that’s done to serve billionaires. For example, Goldman Sachs's Socially Responsible Investing Fund is actually invested in extremely anti-environmental exploitative mega-corporations, directly contradictory to the Fund’s promises to investors. The White Helmets is therefore just another example of such lying and psychopathy, more of The West’s make-pretend-kindly prettified nazism, cosmetifying an actually horrific monster.

NOTE: On September 25th, UK’s new anti-Tony-Blair (i.e., anti Deep-State) Labour Party voted to ban arms-sales to the US-UK-Saud ally Israel, because of Israel’s barbaric treatment of Palestinians; so, one cannot yet say that all political options short of an actual revolution have quite been exhausted. Though UK’s aristocracy hates this post-Blair Labour Party, that Party does have a chance to win power, but only if the public recognize that their own nation’s aristocracy itself is their nation’s enemy. In Israel, America’s Associated Press reported this Labour Party vote as if that vote were an anti-Semitic act, aimed against Jews, instead of an act of basic decency aimed against Israel's Government. How much of a fool does one have to be to trust such ‘news’-media? The ‘news’-media might as well be owned directly by the weapons-makers as be owned by those firms’ owners who own also the ‘news’-media that control the voters. It’s the same Deep State that rules in many countries. It thrives on wars, on lies, and on oppression, both at home, and abroad. It needs to be replaced by democracy (not the current fake variety), in all countries it now rules.

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This is a crosspost with Strategic Culture (first iteration). Strategic Culture is a fraternal site sharing our opposition to imperialist war.


About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

 

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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?


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Why Readers Shouldn’t Trust Staff Reporters (REPOSTED)


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This essay should be required reading by all Americans, and especially by the young aspiring to become "journalists." We doubt it will be read, discussed or even seen in the nation's "J schools", where the aim, as those of a vocational school rather than truly higher education, is to prepare personnel to staff the corporate media machinery as it currently exists, and acceptance and promotion of the careerist goals of most students is left uncriticized.

This essay was first published on Jan 19, 2017. It is republished here due to its urgent relevance to current events.

In order to be a staff journalist, one must adhere to the propaganda-aims of the individual(s) (the employer) who control(s) the given ‘news’ medium. No newsmedia-owner hires ‘reporters’ or editors who report (or allow to be published) facts which contradict that owner’s (or controller’s — because this applies to ‘non-profits’ as well) central viewpoint. The employees are purely megaphones for their boss’s views. That’s what they were hired to be, and that’s what they are if they succeed in their profession and rise up the career-ladder in it. Anything that a staff journalist writes (or allows to be published, if that person is an editor) contradicting the owner’s views, counts against that employee, and increases his/her likelihood of being eliminated, or at least of being denied a deserved promotion (because not doing the person’s job for the employer).

To be a staff ‘journalist’ is to be a ‘reporter’ for hire, who is willing to exclude reporting whatever facts the owner wants his/her audience not to know (which can be some very important things, such as that the President is clearly lying to say that solid evidence exists that “Saddam’s WMD” still exist). Unfortunately, almost all media-owners have an agenda that overrides truth — they don’t obtain the huge funding that’s necessary to build audience-share if they aren’t backed by big money (billionaire investors, and mega-corporate advertisers) to begin with. Opposing the big money is a sure pathway to obscurity in the field of ‘journalism’; and ‘journalism’ prizes (especially on international-news or other major stories) are pig’s lipstick, far more than indications of journalistic competence. The best journalists, and news-sites, are low-budget, basically volunteer operations (such as you now are reading, and wikileaks). The big corporations don’t own them, and don’t advertise in them — and so, don’t control them.

A good example of this is the virtually uniform failure of the U.S.’news’ media (including all the Pulitzer people) to have reported the undeniable and simple — and supremely important — fact that U.S. President George W. Bush was lying to assert that he possessed solid evidence that ‘Saddam’s WMD’ still existed, and solid evidence that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his WMD stockpiles — and for him to have asserted, for example, that “a report came out of the Atomic – the IAEA that they [Iraq] were six months away from developing a [nuclear] weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need” to invade Iraq without allowing international weapons-inspectors to complete any new investigation into the matter. But that ‘IAEA’ ‘report’ was actually fictitious — it didn’t even exist.


Below, a sampling of well known men and women who, posing as "journalists", have served their masters' interests well. (We also include a few of the "invisible" owners, since they bear primary responsibility for the malefactions of their hirelings.) The rule, as Eric Zuesse so accurately (and scathingly) notes, is to carry out and implement the ideological goals of the media owner(s) for whom they work, but such views are also invariably congruent with and embedded in the broader systemic goal of upholding the legitimacy of the capitalist status quo and its international aims (imperialism). In that sense all these people, conceits aside, look upon journalism as simply a competitive career platform for personal advancement. This is just a very small sample in a very crowded but richly rewarding field, as the constellation of disinformers also includes large numbers of personnel from think tanks, academia, politicians, the military, intelligence agencies, corporations, churches, and the world of entertainment.  All certifiable "establishmentarians."—PG

 
David Ignatius, WaPo Senior Columnist  Dean Baquet, NYT Editor Brian Williams, NBC Media critter, onetime Network Anchor
Marty Baron, WaPo Editor in Chief Jeff Bezos, WaPo owner, also of Amazon, and close CIA collaborator. Richest man in the world ($100 bn+) Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., current NYT publisher.
 
Wolf Blitzer, CNN, Network Anchor  Scott Pelley, CBS, Network Anchor Leslie Stahl, CBS 60 Minutes
 
 Norah O'Donnell, CBS  This Morning Dan Rather & Steve Kroft, associated with CBS 60 Minutes  Leslie Moonves, Chairman of the Board, President & CEO of CBS.  ($300 MM)
 
 Bill O'Reilly, Fox, Resident provocateur  Bob Schieffer, CBS  Charlie Rose, CBS/PBS,
in limbo due to #metoo allegations
 
 Chuck Todd, NBC, Host, Meet the Press Clarissa Ward, CBS, foreign correspondent David Muir, ABC Network Anchor
 
 David Gregory, NBC  Elizabeth Palmer, CBS, foreign correspondent (ME) Jeff Fager, CBS 60 Minustes, Producer
   
 Major Garrett, CBS White House correspondent  Holly Williams, CBS Correspondent (ME) Diane Sawyer, ABC

KEY: WaPo: Washington Post  • NYT: New York Times • LAT: Los Angeles Times • ME= Middle East

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hat 7 September 2002 lie by Bush was stenographically reported to the (unfortunately) trusting public, by the many propaganda-organizations (called ‘news’media) — none of which (except the small Washington Times) reported its blatant falsehood — none of them published to readers that, as the IAEA asserted, “There’s never been a report like that [which Bush alleged] issued from this agency.” That ‘IAEA report’ Bush referenced, had simply been cooked-up by George W. Bush and endorsed by Tony Blair. Like one great journalist bannered, “Everyone Knew that Iraq Didn’t Have WMDs”. Among those “Everyone” was Tony Blair himself, but his participation in Bush’s hoax would already have been obvious by no later than 7 September 2002, when Prime Minister Blair was accompanying U.S. President Bush as Bush was fabricating on-the-spot that lie, and when Blair failed to ‘correct’ what the U.S. President had just asserted. Instead, Blair reaffirmed it. They were two gangsters (just ask the Iraqis whether they were gangsters): Bush, and Bush’s lapdog Blair, destroyed Iraq. They are war-criminals, though unprosecuted (because the U.S. aristocracy and the ones that subordinate themselves to it, prohibit any of themselves or their agents from being prosecuted).

As Craig Murray blogged in Britain, the UK’s aristocracy joined America’s aristocracy in deep-sixing the truth on this crucial matter; and, furthermore, Barack Obama continued the rabid lying for war, after George W. Bush had finished being America’s Liar-in-Chief. Obama was merely a more-articulate and cunning version of Bush, in blackface (which won him almost solid support from Blacks, and from ‘liberals’). So, Obama gave us Libya instead of Iraq; and Syria instead of Afghanistan; and Yemen as the Sauds’ playground for their American-made weapons and supported by their U.S. trainers — and also civil war and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine instead of peace with Russia (whose longest European border is the one it shares with Ukraine). And, instead of an economic crash, Obama gave us (besides his pretty rhetoric of ‘concern’ about the elite’s injustices that his actual actions did nothing to punishincreased economic inequality, flatlined wages, and soaring poverty with lots of new burger-flipping jobs. How much are such realities being reported (except by Bernie Sanders, whom the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party cheated out of the nomination, by manipulating the primaries and relying — and feeding — upon Democratic suckers, on Election Day)?

Lies are not permitted to be called ‘lies’, unless they are made by the ‘enemy’ (such as Putin), even if the ‘enemy’ isn’t really the one who is lying.

For example, did the ‘news’ media report that what overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President in February 2014 was no such thing as “democracy demonstrations” which had begun spontaneously in Ukraine after President Yanukovych on 20 November 2013 rejected the EU’s trade offer (which offer would actually have cost Ukraine $160 billion — a cost that was never reported in the U.S. press), but was instead a bloody barbaric coup which Obama’s team had started planning way back in 2011? Did America’s (and ’The West’s’) ’news’ media report this U.S. coup in Ukraine — or even that it WAS a “coup” (or even that it had been one) and that it was (as the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor called it when speaking only to a non-U.S. audience) “the most blatant coup in history”? None of them reported any of that. But now the hostilities against Russia — including the sanctions, and the NATO buildup — are based upon those lies, those potentially WW-III-generating libels, against Russia.

Did they report that the economic sanctions and NATO buildup against Russia that the Obama regime ‘justified’ by ‘Putin’s conquest’ of Crimea was actually forced upon Russia, because it’s next door to Ukraine — forced by Obama’s land-grab of Ukraine via a U.S.-imposed coup in Ukraine (as a hoped-for U.S. missile-base against Russia, a mere five minutes missile-flight to Moscow)? And did they report that this aggressive coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected President, whom 75% of Crimeans had voted for? And did they report that Crimea had been a state in Russia until 1954 when the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine? Obama insisted that Nikita Khrushchev’s imposed transfer of Crimea to Ukraine remain permanently — that Crimea remain as a state in Ukraine, no matter what the Crimean people wanted. What would your own local state do if the federal government were taken over by a bloody coup from an enemy power, and threw out the President whom 75% of the people in your state had voted? Obama was opposed to the right of self-determination of peoples when it referred to Crimeans, but not when it referred to the Scotch, or to the Catalans. And he also opposed democracy in Syria. Was any of that reported in the U.S. ’news’ media? Or will Americans first learn about it in the history books — if even then?

Did the ‘news’ media report that the Obama-gang’s entire case against Russia is based upon lies (even if some of the things that Russia’s Vladimir Putin has said have also been lies)? Did they report that Obama’s charges that Russia is the world’s #1 ‘aggressor’-nation are rabid lies from the world’s actual #1-aggressor-nation?

Volunteer journalists (such as “bloggers”) can report these things; well-paid ‘journalists’ cannot and do not. In true George Orwell 1984 fashion, reporting these things is called ‘fake news’, by the actual fake-news masters — and unfortunately suckers believe them. Even on serious domestic-policy news, the prestigious ‘news’ media pump the aristocracy’s lies, and inculcate the desired (by the super-wealthy) misconceptions.

Thus, the question for many young reporters nowadays is: “Will I be bad enough to keep a good job, or maybe even atrocious enough to advance in it?”

As for the consumers of journalism, there is no substitute for a reader’s demanding that every news-report include mentioning each of its sources, and that those sources are 100% reliable ones on the matter alleged, and that the report link directly to the root-source and not to any mere paraphrase of what it allegedly says. In a democracy, the public don’t trust the mere allegations from ‘authority’. Because, to trust ‘authority’ (note: this refers to fake authorities, not to methodologically careful scientific research) is to invite fascist rule, aggressive wars, and mass-exploitation. (Only a few investigative journalists with a long record of proven-accuracy, such as Seymour Hersh, are exceptions, whom a reader can reasonablyaccept upon the basis of unnamed, private, sources. Such veteran, proven, journalists are rare.)

Getting to the truth, and staying with it, requires constant vigilance and a constantly open mind to the possibility that there are falsehoods in one’s own beliefs. If a person isn’t skeptical of his own beliefs, then he becomes a waste-dump of falsehoods, instead of an accumulator of truths — a truly (i.e., truthfully) educated person. Even today, Republicans approve of George W. Bush, and Democrats approve of Barack Obama. Democracy is thus virtually impossible in America, because both sides are polluted by the same aristocracy. The aristocracy controls both Parties. And the government. And the press.

And that’s the problem. Nobody has figured out a solution for it. And America’s press won’t allow even its existence to be published. So, the public cannot understand why they cannot understand.

What can be done to solve this problem that the press hide from the public? Might there be a way for some members of the press to become part of the solution, and no longer part of the problem? Would that even be possible? If not, then how can the public ever come to understand what the problem is?



About the author

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. Besides TGP, his reports and historical analyses are published on many leading current events and political sites, including The Saker, Huffpost, Oped News, and others.

 

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