by GARY LEUPP

Trump in photo op with Saudi Arabia's new strongman, Mohammed Bin Salman. Both fully qualify as sociopathic war criminals, of course.

There are few countries on earth more oppressive than Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy shaped by Sunni theocracy. It stones adulterers and hurls gay men off buildings by judicial decision. The State Department routinely, matter of factly, reports widespread human rights abuses in the country.  International human rights organizations use Saudi Arabia as the poster child of egregious violations. Everybody knows how Saudi women have been forbidden to even drive cars, although the ban will be lifted due to international pressure in June.

Donald Trump seems unconcerned with such matters. Following the May 2017 sword dance in Riyadh he has cozied up with the Saudi king and crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who just visited Washington. The pair celebrated the $ 200 billion arms deal last year and more sales to come. Trump noted that the Saudis are “a very wealthy nation, and they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth.”

The prince’s visit drew out Codepink and other protestors targeting Saudi repression and the vicious Saudi assault on Yemen, which has killed at least 10,000 civilians an is currently experiencing what the UN terms the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S. abets this assault with military intelligence and refueling. It justifies the Saudi effort to crush the Houthis and restore the former (unelected) president as a necessary move to counter Iranian influence in the region. Even though there is little evidence for Iranian support for the Houthis. The evidence is rather that the Saudi leaders fear and hate Shiism, and tend to depict any Shiites (in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen etc.) as Iranian pawns.

Yemen was governed by a Shiite imamate for a thousand years. It was Shiite before Iran became so. Its Zaydist form of Shiism differs from the Twelvers form prevalent in Iran, although it resembles the Shiism practiced by maybe 15% of Saudis (suffering discrimination in the kingdom). The war is not about Iran’s alleged influence but about Shiism, and Saudi determination to push back what they consider Shiite gains throughout the region since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The young prince is widely viewed as reckless, his Yemen war having become a disaster. Another problematic initiative was his provocation of Qatar, where the U.S. has troops stationed, sanctioning it for alleged terrorist ties (a euphemism for proper trade and diplomacy with Iran, and sponsorship of the Al-Jazeera news network). In the midst of the ongoing crisis, Trump tweeted last November: “I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing….”

There are 10,000 U.S. military personnel at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. You’d think the U.S. president would be concerned about the prospects of a Saudi invasion of Qatar, along the lines of the intervention in Bahrain in March 2011 (intended to suppress Shiite protests and protect the Sunni king), if only because such a conflict could involve them. But he is probably unaware of details, or they flit in and out of his child-mind. Heavy praise over the phone instills in him great confidence in his foreign colleague.

So isn’t it wonderful that the Saudis are going to give the United States some of their wealth, by profiting Boeing, providing jobs, so they can better bomb airports and schools in Yemen? They can do so confident that the U.S. media will ignore their war crimes due to the pressing need to cover presidential sex scandals, Russian collusion, the Mueller investigation, school shootings, fake news on the internet, Saturday Night Live sketches, Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ performance, the removal of Confederate monuments, etc. You notice how coverage of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria has become minimal in the mainstream press. It’s just too painful to report how the U.S. is in a quagmire in Afghanistan, unable to defeat the Taliban; how Iraq remains a horrible mess, as a result of the 2003 invasion, as Iranian influence in the country ascends; how Syria is returning to stability under its secular regime, with Russian and Iranian help, but there is a sharp nascent contradiction between Turkish and U.S. interests in Syria involving the use of Kurdish forces to undermine Assad. All this stuff is too complicated, if not embarrassing, to report. And to report it would be to underscore the fact that U.S. policy foreign has not changed in any fundamental way under Trump.

The reptilian part of the mass mind is primitive as Trump’s. The media keeps saying he has record low popularity. But for a moron to retain 40% support is scary. He has the necessary support base to continue. But CNN and MSNBC are preoccupied with bringing him down, for whatever reason, anything that works.

So we hear next to nothing of Yemen, the Saudis’ bombing of Yemen, the presence of al-Qaeda and ISIL in Yemen. Or the Israeli political crisis. Or the U.S.-Turkish standoff in Syrian Kurdistan. Or the chaos in Libya. The crown prince’s visit ends without any exposure of the nature of the regime because anchors are too busy condemning Trump’s congratulations to Putin on winning the Russian election. As though that message was more outrageous that his praise of the Saudi royals.

Watching CNN’s Morning Joe I note the indignation on Miki Brzenzinski’s face as she reports on Trump’s unforgivable congratulations to Putin, against the advice of his advisors. Even though Russian elections are widely considered (by unnamed people) unfair. (Oh gosh. Imagine an unfair election someplace, and heads of state exchanging greetings about a routinely rigged farcical bourgeois-democratic parliamentary process.) That’s the news.

Yemen should first-page news. Capitalist imperialism should be at the heart of discussion. Not Trump himself, not identity politics, not “fake news” but the horrible system itself under which we live and Trump vows to make greater. By selling U.S. jet fighters built by U.S. workers to the Saudis. All the better when they’re shot down and need replacement. By imposing tariffs on foreign steel to protect U.S. steel workers, while likely hiking the price of steel (hence the price of cars hence lay-offs in the auto industry) Trump is posing as a pro-labor president.  Just as he does in building the wall to keep out Mexicans taking our jobs.

Lines connect the war in Yemen with White House chaos and earlier wars and market-driven media opportunism. The lines expand out like Indra’s net in the Avatamsaka Sutra and glare back at one another. A culture of war shaped by smirking chimps like Dubya Bush leads to domestic terrorism and school shootings. The misogyny inscribed in corporate culture gives rise to the MeToo movement, just as the president gets hit with more accusations. The system is the problem.

Youth I think increasingly understand this.

by CJ Hopkins

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It is utterly stupefying to watch as millions of Americans conform their beliefs and behavior to this official narrative like Inner Party Members in 1984. Apart from the fact that its storyline is simplistic and childish to the point of absurdity, it has only been roughly sixteen years since the corporatocracy introduced the beta version of this same official narrative, to which millions of Americans obediently conformed … which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the destabilization of the entire Middle East, and the transformation of most Western societies into militarized surveillance states.

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"You might naturally assume that these Good Americans would give us the benefit of the doubt this time, i.e., those of us who are challenging the narrative the corporate media has been ramming down our throats since Hillary Clinton lost the election. But, no … nothing of the sort. No, this time, we’re not “terrorist sympathizers.” We’re “Putin sympathizers,” “Russian operatives,” or at the very least we’re “useful idiots” who are helping Russia destroy democracy by “sowing discord,” “disunity,” “division,” and other forms of dissent throughout the West..."

As I outlined at length in part one of this essay, the War on Dissent being rolled out currently is an expansion of the “War on Terror” narrative, the storyline of which was equally childish, and simplistic, and blatantly fabricated. Though it is fashionable these days for the politicians and corporate media propagandists who sold the “Saddam has WMDs” story, and the “Iraq is linked to al Qaeda” lie, and the “we’re fighting terrorism in Afghanistan” fairy tale, to regret how they “misinterpreted the intelligence” that led to the “unfortunate blunder” that launched the global corporatocracy’s occupation and restructuring of the Middle East (which continues unabated to date), anyone with half a brain could see what was really going on at the time. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the “War on Terror” was not a war on terrorism (the concept is nonsensical on its face), but rather, was just the official narrative that would allow the global capitalist ruling classes to (a) employ the United States military to pursue their aims throughout the world with more or less complete impunity, and (b) designate anyone opposing the hegemony of global capitalism a “terrorist.”

Several million of us figured that one out … or at least figured out that the US government, the “intelligence community,” and the corporate media were using Americans’ emotional response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to con us into supporting the invasion and destabilization of the Middle East for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism. So we did what Americans are taught to do. We peaceably assembled to petition our government, as did millions of people across the world, and otherwise raised as much ruckus as we could about how folks were being manipulated, and were denounced as “traitors,” “terrorist sympathizers,” and “conspiracy theory nuts” for our efforts … and not just by the corporatocracy, also by regular Good Americans.

All these years later, knowing what we know, you might assume that all those Good Americans who rushed out to buy American flags to wave as our troops destroyed a country that posed no threat to us whatsoever (and had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) because the corporate media and the “intelligence community” told them Saddam was going to nuke Kansas City … you might assume that all these Good Americans, ashamed at having been made fools of by a bunch of television talking heads and “papers of record” like The New York Times … you might think these folks, who, after all, are not complete idiots the corporatocracy can just hoodwink over and over again using more or less the same bag of tricks … you might naturally assume that these Good Americans would give us the benefit of the doubt this time, i.e., those of us who are challenging the narrative the corporate media has been ramming down our throats since Hillary Clinton lost the election. But, no … nothing of the sort. No, this time, we’re not “terrorist sympathizers.” We’re “Putin sympathizers,” “Russian operatives,” or at the very least we’re “useful idiots” who are helping Russia destroy democracy by “sowing discord,” “disunity,” “division,” and other forms of dissent throughout the West.

This is the essential feature of our new and improved official narrative. The basic storyline has not changed. It’s still “Democracy versus The Terrorists.” The global capitalist ruling classes are simply expanding the already arbitrary and meaningless definition of “terrorism” (or rather, and more broadly, “extremism”). This is a natural, predictable progression, which the ruling classes have been preparing us for. After sixteen years of living in fear of “the terrorists” who “hate us for our freedom,” we are being introduced to a new official enemy. A new, yet familiar official enemy. An official enemy all Good Americans are pre-programmed to hate and fear.

Yes, that’s right, folks, the Rooskies are back, only this time without the Communism. No, this time, their diabolical goal is the destruction of “democracy” itself! Why, exactly, the Rooskies want to destroy democracy is not entirely clear, especially as it would collapse their economy, not to mention precipitate a nuclear war that would wipe out most forms of life on the planet. But, you know, they’re inscrutable, those Rooskies.

According to experts in the corporate media, and our corporate-sponsored representatives in government (and, it goes without saying, the “intelligence community”), the primary weapon the Rooskies are using to destroy democracy, and life on Earth, is this sowing of “divisiveness” and “discord,” and “distrust” of our government and corporate elites, who love us as they love their own children, and who would never try to manipulate us, or treat us like interchangeable commodities, or bankrupt us with their Ponzi schemes, or debt-enslave our families for profit, or any other horrible things like that.

This is the type of mindless hogwash Americans are being pressured to swallow, and in fact are swallowing, millions of them. But then, this is how propaganda works. It doesn’t have to make any sense. In fact, it’s usually more effective if it doesn’t. In profoundly authoritarian cultures like the contemporary USA, people tend to believe the authorities, particularly when they’re all repeating the same simple message over and over. People want to believe the authorities. They want to because they’ve been conditioned to want to from the time they were children by their parents, teachers, political leaders, the corporate media, television, Hollywood, cultural icons, and more or less every other ideological organ of “normal society.”

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Will Hurd, Texas Democrat, part of his party's shameless Russiagate witch-hunt, spreading lies courtesy of an obliging media. The threat to Americans is however bipartisan.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is why, when it’s time to whip up popular support for a war of aggression (or a war against anyone expressing dissent), all the ruling classes have to do is make up an emotionally-loaded narrative with a halfway-believable official enemy and have their “authoritative media sources” repeat it, over and over and over, in a thousand different iterations, each repetition reifying the others, until the narrative becomes the axiomatic “truth,” which no respectable, normal person would ever even think of wanting to question. In fact, once an official narrative has become the axiomatic “truth,” it can be rather dangerous psychologically if these “respectable persons” are confronted with evidence that demonstrates that the official narrative (or, in other words, their “reality”) is based on … well, a load of horseshit, as by this time they’ve forgotten it is fiction, and thus genuinely believe the lies they’re telling.

If you’d like to see an example of this in action, take a few minutes and watch what happens to Luke Harding, author of the book Collusion, when he is interviewed by Aaron Mate. (See appendix below.) What you will witness is Harding melting down as his “collusion” narrative (i.e., the premise of his book) falls to pieces under Mate’s questioning, which remains collegial and calm throughout. Clearly, it had never occurred to Harding that anyone would question the “RussiaGate” narrative, and especially not someone else in “the business,” as mainstream journalists are trained to accept and parrot whatever the ruling classes tell them. When he finally realizes what is happening, (i.e., that his “reality” is melting away like your face in the mirror on a bad acid trip), he calls Mate a “collusion rejectionist,” and abruptly ends the interview.

This is just the kind of thing the corporatocracy wants to eliminate, or relegate to the margins of the Internet. They can’t have journalists like Aaron Mate running around punching holes in their narrative, or at least not where normal Americans can see it. It’s all fine and good to have folks like Hannity and Alex Jones jabbering about deep state conspiracies, as normal Americans don’t take them seriously, but rational journalists like Mate, if they’re not going to cooperate with the official narrative, well, then they need to be censored, or algorithmically deranked, or otherwise marginalized, and the sooner the better. Which is exactly what the corporatocracy is doing, and what they intend to continue doing until “unity,” “harmony,” and “trust” is restored.

And this is just the beginning, folks. If you want to get a glimpse of our dystopian future, read this recent piece in The Atlantic. It’s by Representative Will Hurd, of Texas (a Democrat, and black at that!—Eds.) but it conveys the sentiments of the corporate ruling classes and their loyal servants in government, generally. I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s one quote:

“To address continued Russian disinformation campaigns, we need to develop a national counter-disinformation strategy. The strategy needs to span the entirety of government and civil society, to enable a coordinated effort to counter the threat that influence operations pose to our democracy. It should implement similar principles to those in the Department of Homeland Security’s Strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, with a focus on truly understanding the threat and developing ways to shut it down.”

The emphasis is mine. The Orwellianism is Hurd’s. The message couldn’t possibly be clearer.

If you’ve enjoyed the Department of Homeland Security over the course of these last sixteen years, the constant low-level paranoia, the invasive searches, the body scans, the TSA agents groping your kids, the cops and soldiers standing around in public places in body armor with their assault rifles in the “sling-ready” position, the NSA listening in on your phone calls, and all the other features of The War on Terror … you’re going to love The War on Dissent. 

APPENDIX
December 23, 2017

Where’s the ‘Collusion’?
Amid news the Mueller probe could extend through 2018, Guardian reporter Luke Harding and TRNN’s Aaron Mate discuss Russiagate and Harding’s new book “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win”

Click on the orange button below.

[bg_collapse view=”button-orange” color=”#4a4949″ icon=”eye” expand_text=”Click here and watch the interview with Luke Harding” collapse_text=”Show Less” ]

Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of the #1 bestseller Collusion : Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (2011) and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (1997), nominated for the Orwell Prize. The film rights to WikiLeaks were sold to Dreamworks and the film, “The Fifth Estate,” came out in 2013. His books have been translated into 13 languages.

transcript

transcript

AARON MATÉ: It’s The Real News. I’m Aaron Maté. 2017 is almost over, but Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is not. In fact, the Washington Post reports that Mueller’s probe could last another year through much of 2018 at a minimum. The prospect is sure to annoy President Trump who has been hampered by the Russia story throughout his first year in office. Well according to a best-selling new book, Trump has ample reason to worry. The book is called ‘Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.’ I’m joined up with the book’s author, Luke Harding, a veteran journalist for The Guardian and the paper’s former Moscow correspondent.

Luke, welcome. Let’s start with the book’s title. Do you think there actually was collusion?

LUKE HARDING: I think we’re already across the line in terms of collusion. I think actually you have to go back a long way to see when it began to Donald Trump’s first trip to Soviet Moscow in 1987 paid for by the Soviet Union where he was discussing hotel deals. I think we can say — and I’m sure this is something that Robert Mueller is looking at — that there’s kind of long-term relationship. That doesn’t mean that Donald Trump is an agent or a KGB colonel, merely that there’s been a kind of transactional deal going back a very long way indeed.

AARON MATÉ: That’s also an assertion of the infamous Steele dossier, that there’s a transactional relationship between Trump and the Kremlin and that Putin has been cultivating Trump for several years now. But explain why you think that is and why you think there’s evidence of a transactional relationship.

LUKE HARDING: Well I think you just kind of have to look at what happened. We had Donald Trump’s trip back in the kind of late Cold War period, and I talked to a number of sources for this book, some in Moscow, some in London, some in Washington, some defectors. I met with Chris Steele, the author of the dossier, as well. I think what you have to understand is the fact that the sort of Soviet state and its Russian successor is raking on kind of cultivating people, particularly Americans.

Bringing Trump over for this kind of trip was pretty unusual. It was what’s known in the intelligence trade as kind of classic cultivational curation. We know from leaked KGB memos the kind of person they were looking for during this period was someone who was vain, narcissistic, interested in money, perhaps unfaithful in their marriage. Basically Donald Trump kind of ticks every single box. When I was researching this, I tracked down the daughters of the Soviet ambassador at the time who went up to Trump Tower, flattered Trump, and said, “You’ve built the most wonderful building in America.” So it goes on.

I think it’s gone through phases. Moscow’s been interested in Trump, not interested in him, and then most recently according to the Steele dossier, became more interested in him from about 2012, 2013 onwards at a time when Donald Trump was the sort of foremost exponent of birtherism. Obama was in office. Of course we have the famous trip by Trump to Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

AARON MATÉ: Okay. But where then is the proof of a transactional relationship?

LUKE HARDING: Well I mean there are secret meetings as the book says that we now know about, some of which we have discovered about in the last few months. We have Donald Trump, Jr meeting with a Russian lawyer now famous, Natalia Veselnitskaya, having been promised information from the Russian government as part of its campaign to support Mr. Trump and to hurt Hillary Clinton. We have four indictments by Robert Mueller-

AARON MATÉ: Luke, Luke, let me stop you there. Luke, let me stop you there. If we already have a transactional relationship between Trump and Russia going back to the late ’80s as you say, then why would they have needed a music publicist to set up this meeting? I mean presumably that level of relationship would have entailed some high-level contacts that wouldn’t have needed an intermediary like this kooky music publicist, Rob Goldstone.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah. I think what you have to understand about Russian espionage is it’s not Vladimir Putin sitting in a cave flicking a red switch and things happening across the continental United States. It doesn’t work like that. It’s opportunistic. It’s very often pretty low-budget. The kind of hacking operation to hack the Democratic Party was done by two separate groups of kind of Kremlin hackers probably not earning kind of huge sums of money. So some of it is kind of improvisational.

The most important thing is that you have people with access, which in this case is Donald Trump and his entourage. The oligarch involved is someone called Aras Agalarov who hosted Trump in 2013. You’re right. The music publicist is a bit of a curious guy, called Goldstone, but nonetheless it works. He actually managed to bring the Moscow lawyer to Trump Tower and set up this meeting which, by the way, the Trump team said nothing about until it finally leaked out early this summer, a year almost after it happened.

AARON MATÉ: Right. But their explanation is that the meeting had nothing to do with the emails that were later released by Wikileaks, that they were about that the lawyer was promising compromising information about Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Russia, and in return she wanted some assistance lifting sanctions which had nothing to do with the whole Wikileaks aspect.

LUKE HARDING: Well I think Donald Trump, Jr didn’t know that when he took the meeting. It’s about intentionality. Meanwhile, we have George Papadopoulos, foreign policy aide to Donald Trump, who in the spring of last year is running around my town where I am, London, meeting a mysterious professor who features in Mueller’s indictment with contacts to Moscow who tells Papadopoulos-

AARON MATÉ: Well hold on a second, Luke. Hold on a second, Luke. Hold on a second. He tells Papadopoulos that he has contacts to Moscow. We actually have no clue what those contacts are. His name is Joseph Mifsud, right? He’s a professor in the UK right now, and Papadopoulos claims that Mifsud told him that he has high-level Russian government contacts. So far, there’s been no even proof of that.

LUKE HARDING: Well it’s in the indictment. I mean either you kind of live in the empirical world or you don’t, but I mean-

AARON MATÉ: In the empirical world in the indictment, Mifsud claims that he has … Or Papadopoulos says that Mifsud claims he had Russian government ties, but that doesn’t mean it’s true.

LUKE HARDING: Well no, but a lot of very good journalists both in the U.S. and elsewhere have obviously tried to get in touch with Mr. Mifsud to kind of try and talk to him. We haven’t had kind of much luck, but I think you have to kind of understand the context which is that what happened in the U.S. last year isn’t divorced from other kind of Russian influence operations particularly where I sit in Europe.

This is not a new move; it’s kind of an old move. There’s been quite a lot of Russian intelligence activity over the years including most spectacularly the murder in 2006 of a Russian dissident called Alexander Litvinenko with a radioactive cup of tea. I read a book about this case which came out in the U.S. earlier this year with a huge public inquiry. There’s a sort of volume of evidence — forensic, scientific, intelligence — to support this. I think that this is-

AARON MATÉ: Whoa. Wait. Sorry. I’m sorry. Support what?

LUKE HARDING: To support the fact that essentially the level of espionage from Russia at the moment is comparable to Cold War levels, and I think in some ways it’s going beyond. What happen [inaudible 00:08:14] influence operation [inaudible 00:08:17] how effective it was whether it pushed Donald Trump over the line but he was going to win anyway and so on. I think that Russia played role in last year’s election is a matter of fact. I mean it’s certainly what U.S. intelligence agencies believe. Practically everybody recognizes it apart from Donald Trump who equivocates on the subject.

AARON MATÉ: I have to tell you just because U.S. intelligence agencies say something … And by the way, it’s not even all the intelligence agencies; it’s a handpicked group assembled under the outgoing president, Barack Obama, by James Clapper. They say something, but speaking of empirical evidence, they presented no empirical evidence and they still haven’t. I don’t understand why we’re supposed to take that on faith.

LUKE HARDING: Well I mean you don’t take anything on faith. I mean obviously you seek to verify and to be evidential and to kind of follow leads wherever they go, but when writing my book, I talked a lot of people, one of whom was Steele, but I talked to other sources as well. I think people who are sort of skeptical about the whole kind of Russia thesis and it sounds to me like you are one of those people-

AARON MATÉ: I am. Yes, I am.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah. Right. Don’t kind of quite appreciate the nature of Vladimir Putin’s state. I mean I lived there for four years. I was there for between 2007 and 2011. I was eventually kind of kicked out for writing stories about kleptocracy, about Putin’s fortune, about human rights, about journalists. I’m not sure if you know, but some of my friends in Moscow who are journalists have been murdered. This is not a nice or benign regime. It’s-

AARON MATÉ: [crosstalk 00:10:04] I’m certainly not arguing that Vladimir Putin is a nice person or that he has great policies, but to me though, that doesn’t automatically mean that he waged a massive influence campaign that got Donald Trump elected. Part of the reason why I’m skeptical of that is that, again, there still is actual … There’s zero evidence so far. There’s a lot of supposition and innuendo.

LUKE HARDING: Well I’m a journalist. I’m a storyteller. I’m not head of the CIA or the NSA, but what I can tell you is that there have been similar operations in France most recently when President Macron was elected.

AARON MATÉ: Well actually, Luke, that’s not true. That’s actually … That’s straight up not true. The French … After that election, the French cyber intelligence agency came out and said it could have been virtually anybody.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah, if you’d let me finish, there have been attacks on the German parliament.

AARON MATÉ: Okay. [crosstalk 00:13:13] but wait, Luke. Do you concede that the France hack that you just claimed didn’t happen?

LUKE HARDING: That it didn’t happen? Sorry?

AARON MATÉ: Do you concede that the France, that the Russian hacking of the French election that you just claimed actually is not true?

LUKE HARDING: Well I mean that it’s not true? I meant the French report was inconclusive, but you have to look at this kind of contextually. We’ve seen other attacks on European states as well from Russia, that they have very kind of advanced cyber capabilities.

AARON MATÉ: Where else?

LUKE HARDING: Sorry?

AARON MATÉ: Well else?

LUKE HARDING: Well Estonia. Have you heard of Estonia? It’s a state in the Baltics which was crippled by a massive cyberattack in 2008 which certainly all kind of Western European and former Eastern European states think was carried out by Moscow. I mean I was in Moscow at the time where relations between the two countries were extremely bad. This is a kind of ongoing thing. Now you might say, quite legitimately, “Well the U.S. does the same thing. The UK does the same thing,” and I think to a certain extent that is certainly right. I think what was different last year was the attempt to kind of dump this stuff up out into kind of U.S. public space and to try and influence public opinion there. That’s unusual. Of course that’s a matter of congressional inquiry and something Mueller is looking at too.

AARON MATÉ: Right. But again, my problem here is that the examples that are frequently presented to substantiate claims of this massive Russian hacking operation around the world prove out to be false. So France as I mentioned. You also mentioned Germany. There was a lot of worry about Russian hacking of the German elections, but it turned out — and there’s plenty of articles since then that have acknowledged this — that there was no Russian hacking of Germany.

LUKE HARDING: I’m afraid there was hacking of the Bundestag, the German parliament, in 2015. I spent four years as a correspondent in Berlin. I do understand your skepticism, but I think maybe you might just go to Moscow for a couple of weeks, talk to human rights people. There’s a fantastic organization there called Memorial. Meet Alexei Navalny who’s the main kind of opposition candidate there who’s an anti-corruption campaigner whose brother has been jailed for his activities and who’s been disqualified by the Kremlin from standing in the election. Just talk to people, ask them about Kremlin hacking, ask them about whether they think … I mean talk to Russians on this.

AARON MATÉ: The Russians … The Russians I’ve spoken to … And again, I obviously can’t speak to everybody. The ones I’ve spoken to think all this is ridiculous. Again, no one’s … I’m not arguing that the Russian government is not a repressive right-wing state. It is, but that doesn’t mean that it’s managed to elect a president. Let me ask you-

LUKE HARDING: What was — Sorry. What do you think Russian spy agencies do? You think they sit around having cups of tea or-

AARON MATÉ: I think they do … Luke, come on. I think Russian spy agencies do what all spy agencies do: they carry out the government’s interests abroad. Again, I don’t see how you get from that to they pulled off a massive conspiracy to elect a president based on the fact that back when Donald Trump was hosting The Apprentice they had the foresight to see a future U.S. president who they were going to get elected.

LUKE HARDING: No, I mean that’s a kind of caricatural sort of précis of what’s happening.

AARON MATÉ: But it’s true. According to the Steele dossier, the cultivated Trump when he was hosting the Apprentice.

LUKE HARDING: Well I mean that they cultivated Trump, I’ve got no doubts about. By the way, talk to … I mean I’ve talked to a lot of people about Steele. I mean he was a kind of British intelligence guy for 22 years. He spent three years in Soviet Moscow between 1990 and 1993 where he saw the kind of collapse of this kind of empire first hand and the end of communism. He is … You may not like it, but he’s actually regarded in London and Washington as being pretty credible. Before the Trump dossier, he produced a series of other reports including on the war in Ukraine in 2014 using the same sources that he used for his sort of Trump memos which actually were true and were read by the State Department, even read by John Kerry when he was U.S. Secretary of State. There is a kind of context to all this.

AARON MATÉ: Luke, Luke, why should we care if people who we haven’t met, anonymous officials, say that this ex-British spy who was hired by Donald Trump’s political opponents, first Republicans then the Clinton campaign, say that he’s credible? What matters is the evidence, and whether there’s evidence of, for example, Steele’s claim that Donald Trump hired prostitutes and that Putin has a tape of that. I mean you I’m sure admit that these are pretty wild claims, and instead of just believing them based on the fact that some people say he’s credible, we should have evidence.

LUKE HARDING: Did you read my book by the way?

AARON MATÉ: Well listen, I did what I usually do when I do a book-

LUKE HARDING: So you didn’t even read [crosstalk 00:18:23]-

AARON MATÉ: I skimmed through it, and actually I have some parts that I want to quote for you. Go ahead. Listen, yes. I did not read the full book. No, I did not, but I skimmed through it as I do when I do book interviews because it’s hard to find time to read full books. Go ahead.

LUKE HARDING: I understand that. I mean … Sorry. The lights just out here. I think if you’d read my book which unfortunately you didn’t before you decided to do the interview, you would have seen that there’s a whole history of the FSB and its kind of KGB predecessor doing these kind of entrapment operations going back to the Cold War, enticing American diplomats, British diplomats, and so on with kind of honeypots. The KGB even had a kind of term for the kind of attractive young women they would send to kind of seduce and try and compromise officials. They called them “swallows,” which is a rather kind of pleasant and poetic title. Really anyone who knows Russia or has bothered to read books on the Cold War sort of realizes this is precisely what they do.

Now did they do it with Donald Trump? We don’t know. Steele thinks they did. Donald Trump will know the answer to that question for sure, and so will Vladimir Putin. I think one of the kind of themes through the last few months which I think probably you would agree on is that Donald Trump is incredibly nice about Mr. Putin when he’s very rude about a whole host of other leaders including, for example, Theresa May, the Prime Minister in my town, in England or the Germans or Angela Merkel. We see this repeatedly.

AARON MATÉ: I agree, Luke. He has affinity for right-wing leaders. He speaks highly of Putin. He speaks highly of … I’ve never heard him insult Netanyahu. I’ve never heard him speak critically of Netanyahu, but that doesn’t mean that I think that Netanyahu controls [Trump]. Even though, by the way, there’s more proof of collusion, right now at least, with Netanyahu than Putin because we know now from the indictment of Flynn that Netanyahu got Trump and his team to try to undermine Obama at the UN when Obama was going to let pass a UN vote critical of Israel.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah. I mean I understand that, but I think it goes beyond the sort of Trump-Putin relationship. It goes beyond a kind of affinity with kind of ultra-nationalist dictators. You can call it that, but I think there’s more to it than that. I think Putin genuinely does have [inaudible 00:20:47] of Donald Trump.

AARON MATÉ: And my point is that just because Trump hasn’t criticized Putin doesn’t mean that he is Putin’s puppet. By that logic, he also would be Netanyahu’s puppet too. Let me … In terms of the book … Go ahead. Please.

LUKE HARDING: But I’m not saying that he’s Putin’s puppet, that’s your word, that’s not my word. But go on.

AARON MATÉ: Okay. Well listen. In terms of the book, I will … I do want to quote you one part that I did read that I found interesting which is where you are talking about the potential connections between Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, and the Russian government. You spoke to a Manafort associate. Hopefully I have his name … Hopefully I can pronounce his name properly. Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik wrote you by email in response to your questions about his relationship with Manafort, and you recount that Kilimnik responded by telling you that the collusion issue was gibberish and then he signed his email off by saying “Off to collect my paycheck at KGB.” Then he has an emoji smiley face with two parentheses. Okay.

You write “The thing which gave me pause was Kilimnik’s use of smiley faces. True, Russians are big emoticon fans, but I’ve seen something similar before. In 2013, the Russian diplomat in charge of political influence operations in London was named Sergey Nalobin. Nalobin had close links with Russian intelligence. He was a son of a KGB general. His brother worked for the FSB. Nalobin looked like a career foreign intelligence officer.” You go on to write “On a Twitter feed, Nalobin described himself thus: a brutal agent of the Putin dictatorship, smiley face.” So are you inferring there that because two Russians used a smiley face that that’s proof that Manafort’s associate was a tool of the Russian government?

LUKE HARDING: No. I mean really what you’re doing is now rather a sort of silly exercise. You haven’t read the book, but you’re taking one small bit and jumping on that.

AARON MATÉ: Because you’re using emoticons as proof of a Russian tie so I’m asking you about it.

LUKE HARDING: If you let me-

AARON MATÉ: Okay. Please. Yeah.

LUKE HARDING: Your kind of question and maybe you could read the rest of the book when you finish the interview, but I mean Kilimnik is the guy that Paul Manafort last summer emailed about trying to set up a kind of private briefing — this is where Manafort is still Trump’s campaign manager — for a very famous oligarch called Oleg Deripaska. Now Deripaska more or less sort of sits at the right hand of Putin. He certainly has very close relations with him.

I think it’s perfectly kind of legitimate to ask what kind of role Kilimnik was playing. I emailed him. We’re in kind of correspondence. He’s still in contact, by the way, with Paul Manafort. He was emailing him a couple weeks ago. Manafort, I met. I mean there’s a chapter about what he was doing in Ukraine, about his work for Victor Yanukovych, about how Yanukovych became a kind of kleptocrat. He’s now been indicted with money laundering, with conspiracy against the U.S. by Robert Mueller. So I think it’s perfectly legitimate to look at him.

AARON MATÉ: Luke, I’m not saying it’s not legitimate. I’m taking issue with you writing “The thing which gave me pause was Kilimnik’s use of smiley faces,” as if the use of smiley faces is somehow evident of a nefarious Russian government tie. By the way, let me ask you about Manafort. What was Manafort doing in Ukraine? Because as I think you even acknowledge in the book, again, because I did read through it … You even acknowledge in the book that Manafort was not even trying to steer Yanukovych towards a pro-Kremlin policy. I mean that’s widely reported that he actually was trying to orient Yanukovych towards the West.

LUKE HARDING: Well I mean it’s more complicated than that. I mean certainly some of the things he did were kind of pro-Western, but at the same time what Manafort really did was to take someone who was essentially a kind of post-Soviet crook and gangster and refashioned him into the image of a kind of modern Western-style politician. It was quite successful. When I met Manafort in 2008, he told me that Yanukovych believed in the rule of law, that he’d changed, that he was not a creature of Moscow anymore, and so on.

This strategy worked quite effectively. In 2010, Yanukovych became president. Then when he did that, the first thing he did was to jail the main opposition leader, someone called Yulia Tymoshenko. Basically kind of suborn parliament, get rid of independent courts, and loot the state to the tune of billions of dollars. What I actually write in my book is that everything that Manafort told me during this 2008 period was essentially a lie. It was kind of untrue.

Now we now know from Mueller that Manafort made about $75 million allegedly from his activities in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, and in Moscow. Of course his next client after Yanukovych who skipped after Russia with his billions was Donald Trump. One question that I’ve never been able to get a satisfactory answer for is how did Manafort end up running Donald Trump’s campaign. You have to look at the constellation of people around Donald Trump, and very many of them, not all of them but very many of them, had a kind of Russian connection whether it’s Wilbur Ross, the secretary of state, or Michael Flynn, or Carter Page, or George Papadopoulos who’s been done for lying to the FBI, or Wilbur Ross, the Commerce secretary. I mean you can be benign and say it’s a curious coincidence, but I think it’s more than that.

AARON MATÉ: Well I think Manafort is a longtime Republican operative, and I don’t think the answer necessarily is that, because he had ties to a Ukrainian president who he was trying to orient towards an anti-Russian policy essentially which, by the way, does not, I think, add weight to the argument that Manafort was in Putin’s pocket if he’s trying to get Yanukovych to steer towards the West, but I think we can move on from that point.

Let’s wrap, Luke. Can we agree then that there is no proof of collusion? There even is no proof of hacking. If I have it right from you, the main reason to question, to think that there is a tie between Trump and Russia is a.) the financial connections between people in his circle and Russians possibly, and also the fact that Russia has a history as we’ve heard you outline of cultivating foreigners.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah. I mean I don’t agree. I mean this is your view of there’s no collusion and there’s no proof of hacking. I mean this is what you assert.

AARON MATÉ: I said there’s no proof of it, yes.

LUKE HARDING: Firstly, I don’t accept that. I don’t think that’s the case. But what I was trying to say at the beginning was just to explain that actually what happened last year happens in a kind of wider context of Soviet and Russian espionage. We haven’t really talked very much about Vladimir Putin, about the kind of person he is. I mean he’s a former KGB agent who spent most of his career in an organization that regards the United States as an adversary, not just any old adversary, but what you say in Russian is called the glavnyy protivnik, the main adversary. He thinks about America in kind of zero-sum terms. He thinks that’s what good for Russia is bad for America and vice versa.

There’s no doubt that he disliked Obama, that he loathed Hillary Clinton, and that he was very, very keen for Donald Trump to win. I mean you just have to look at Russia … I mean, I speak Russian. Look at Russian state media in the run-up who were portraying Hillary as a kind of deranged mad woman warmonger and Trump as a kind of peaceful nice guy with whom Russia could do business. There were kind of clear preferences, but also there’s this history of espionage which is still, whether you like it or not, whether you accept it or not, very much ongoing and I think we’ll see again both in 2018 and in 2020.

AARON MATÉ: Okay. I guess I’ll just say I think we’re conflating the fact that Putin is not a nice person, that yes he does not like Hillary Clinton, he loathes the U.S. for many reasons including the expansion of NATO — I think we’re conflating that with evidence and a conclusion that that meant that he cultivated Trump and intervened in the election. I think those two things are different.

LUKE HARDING: That’s your view. It would be great if you could go to Moscow, go to Kiev, go to the post-Soviet world, talk to people from the Russian opposition, talk to human rights activists, talk to journalists whose colleagues have been murdered, and perhaps understand a little bit better the kind of state that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is. I think you’d be doing yourself a service and you’d be doing your listeners a service.

AARON MATÉ: I don’t think I’ve countered anything you’ve said about the state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The issue under discussion today has been whether there was collusion, the topic of your book.

LUKE HARDING: Yeah, I know, but you’re clearly a collusion rejectionist. I’m not kind of sure what evidence short of Trump and Putin in the sauna together would convince you. Clearly nothing would convince you.

AARON MATÉ: But again … No. But again, well look. This gets back to the issue. The question is whether there is any evidence so far, and I don’t see it. It looks like Luke has logged off. Is that true? Well we’ve lost Luke Harding. I’m not sure if that was intentional or not, but regardless we’re going to wrap the interview here. The book is called Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win. I’m Aaron Mate. Thanks for joining us on The Real News.

[/bg_collapse]

"...those journos sitting in plastic cubicles, are simply doing their well-paid job of presenting the ideas of their masters in a standard, elegant and grammatically correct prose."

Andre in one of his countless stops around the world, this one in Asia. He is a genuine roving correspondent for the people.

They say Propaganda! In the West, both the mainstream media and even some of the so-called progressive outlets are shouting: “Those Russians and Chinese and the others like them, they are at it again! Their vicious propaganda is infiltrating our democratic, freedom-loving countries, spreading confusion and chaos!”

Yes, ban or at least curb RT, contain TeleSur, and if at all possible, throw Press TV to the dogs. And put the writers of NEO, Sputnik, Global Times and other foreign outlets on that proverbial Western mass media ‘no fly list’.

How truly democratic. How open-minded, how ‘objective’!

It goes like this:

“We have been indoctrinating the entire Planet for centuries, mostly unopposed, but if anyone dares to bite back, we will do our best to discredit, even to muzzle them, in no time.”

The author knows full well that decontextualising news, eviscerating the shameful historical record accumulated over centuries by the brutal western imperialists, now incorporated in the US hegemon, is one of the most effective ways to inject toxic spin into anything. 

Then if you protest, if you dare say that kicking out and gagging alternative media sources stinks of the lowest grade of censorship, and of imposing some sort of monopoly on propaganda, you’d be shouted at: “What do you know about propaganda? You really want to see some hard-core propaganda, look at those colorful military parades and political speeches coming out from Pyongyang!” Naturally, these are taken out of context and presented (or framed) in a certain way, and only after that are they always readily available on the BBC and other, should we say ‘reputable’ and ‘objective’, European and North American television channels.

What you will not be told is that if you happen to live in New York or London, Paris or Sydney, Munich or Madrid, you yourself are most likely in the highest bracket of propaganda consumption in the world; that in fact, you could easily be a true propaganda junkie – hooked on it, fully dependent on it, seeking it, even regularly demanding it, at least subconsciously.

*

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]ropaganda, what is it really?

We all ‘propagate’ or ‘propagandize’ something. At least we publicize what we think and believe in our emails, we are spreading it in the pubs, or while out meeting friends and loved ones.

Some of us do it professionally. We write essays, books, give speeches, make films. We go into politics. We join revolutionary movements. We want to change the world. We speak, write about what we believe.

It is all propaganda – spreading our ideas, trying to influence others. What is done in the church or mosque, is clearly propaganda as well, although it is rarely defined as such publicly.

All of us have some opinions, some worldview. You know, at least some very basic one… Or when it comes, for instance, to the mainstream media outlets, their bosses and owners definitely have quite clear designs, opinions and goals (employees, those journos sitting in plastic cubicles, are simply doing their well-paid job of presenting the ideas of their masters in a standard, elegant and grammatically correct prose).

*

In brief: whenever we want to influence the world, we try to ‘package’ and present our thoughts beautifully, extracting the most powerful and attractive parts and passages of our ideals and principles.

There is nothing wrong with that. We communicate, we propagate our thoughts and dreams, as we are trying to improve the world. Such propaganda is, I believe, healthy.

The true problem begins when the same tactics and techniques are used for something absolutely destructive and objectively evil: like colonialism, racism, imperialism or the attempt to control and plunder entire nations and continents. And an even greater problem arises, when it happens with almost unlimited funding, and as a consequence, some of the most capable brains get involved, including those of the communication experts, educators, and even psychologists.

When such a scenario develops, it is not suddenly anymore about ‘discussion’ and ‘finding the best way forward for our humanity’. It is about total, full control of people’s brains, about the elimination of all alternatives.

That is brutal, fatal propaganda. And it is exactly the propaganda which has been domesticated in the West, and is rapidly spreading its metastases all over the world.

If unchecked and unchallenged, such developments may lead to the absolute destruction of humans’ ability to think freely, to compare and to analyze, but it may also eradicate the ability to feel, to dream and to dare.

This most likely, is the aim of Western neo-colonialism. Its ‘success’ depends on the total, dogmatic cultural and ‘intellectual’ monopoly imposed by Europe and the United States on the rest of the world. Such a monopoly can only be attained through a one-sided interpretation of current affairs as well as world history.

The main goal is the absolute and unconditional control of the Planet.

After the destruction of the Soviet Union and during the rapid pro-market reforms in China (and the Western infiltration of China’s education system) in the same period of time, the West came extremely close to achieving its goal.

The world fully abandoned to Western imperialism and market fundamentalism, began suffering from a monstrous wave of privatization, theft of natural and other resources, and consequent social collapse of entire huge nations, from Russia to Indonesia.

Then ‘something happened’. The impact on the Planet became so devastating that many parts of the world abruptly stopped following the Western dictate. Russia had risen to its feet. China, under the guidance of the Communist Party and especially under the leadership of President Xi, returned to ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, putting a much greater accent on the quality of human life, culture and ecology, than on financial markets. Latin America began its new wave of the struggle for independence against the US and its own European elites. Many other countries, from Iran to South Africa, Eritrea, Syria and DPRK, refused to surrender.

They got demonized by Western propaganda, demonized day and night, systematically and relentlessly.

Whoever has stood for the interests of his or her people, be they a Communist, a socialist, a patriot, or even a populist, has been incessantlysmeared, ridiculed and humiliated. President Assad or Ahmadinejad, Putin, Xi, Duterte, Zuma, Maduro, Castro, it mattered nothing how popular they were at home; it matters nothing! Simple as that: Whoever stands tall and fights for his people, faces character assassination in the Western media, which, in turn, directly or indirectly controls most of the media outlets in the world!

To get all of the patriotic and progressive leaders out of the way, openly serves the interests of the Western Empire and its business offshoots.

No one has doubts about this, anymore. It would take tremendous discipline not to see it.

Yet the opposite is being constantly repeated by the Western television stations, newspapers, magazines, and even the universities.

Ignoring facts, manufacturing conspiracy theories, denying that white is white, black is black, refusing to admit that human blood is red, that our hearts are on the left, and that above all, people are desiring their own identity, culture, justice and safety, isn’t this the highest level of propaganda, of indoctrination, of total brainwashing?

Those who are trashing ‘state-owned’ and ‘state-sponsored’ media outlets in non-Western countries, should be asking some very essential questions: “Is there any difference between those ‘private’ or ‘state’ media outlets in the West? Is there any substantial ideological rift between the CNN, BBC, The Independent, The New York Times, France/24 or DW?”

In Europe and in North America, as well as in their ‘client’ states, business interests control the government. They are actually the ones who are electing, or call it ‘selecting’ the government. Private or state-funded, the Western mass media is toeing the same line. It is part of the apparatus.

In non-Western countries, the state-supported media outlets are beginning to propagate various new lines, mostly defending and highlighting the interests of their own countries, which in a way is a revolutionary development.

So, there is finally some global competition, isn’t there, dear comrades imperialists and capitalists? But what do we see… suddenly you don’t like it? You want your global monopoly? Is that your idea of freedom and ‘free competition’? You want your propaganda to be the only one on Earth!

---

Andre visiting Chomsky

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]everal years ago, when I was making the film and writing a book with Noam Chomsky (“On Western Terrorism – From Hiroshima To Drone Warfare”, Pluto Press), we spoke a lot about Western propaganda.

Noam brought to my attention, that Nazi Germany was extremely impressed by the U.S. advertising industry.

Then, in a way, Western propaganda also became shaped by shameless advertising production, by brainless and outrightly deceiving commercials. The continuous downpour of pseudo-reality has been melting away all human decency and rationality, ever since.

I have written about this issue a lot, too, particularly in the pages of my book “Exposing Lies of The Empire”.

Television, Hollywood, but also indoctrinating, intellectually sterilizing and the grotesque way of ‘spreading knowledge’ by the North American and increasingly also by the European universities –it all has very little to do with the reality in which the world is living, as well as with the true concerns of the people; with their hopes, fears, and desires and aspirations.

Western commercials, entertainment, educational institutions – these are all powerful tools of propaganda. They propagate, force and inject into human sub-consciousness extremely primitive, false but powerful messages: “No matter what, our present arrangement of the world is correct and just. Our economic and social system is the most natural in the world. Our political system is not perfect, but it is the best nevertheless.”

*

Andre driving in Afghanistan.

Noam Chomsky seemed to be fascinated with my past, and for some good reasons: I myself was totally indoctrinated, endlessly brainwashed by Western propaganda, when I was a child, and then a very young man.

I was born in the beautiful city of Leningrad, Soviet Union. My mother is a Russian-Chinese architect, father a Czech scientist. I grew up in Pilsen, in then Czechoslovakia. Pilsen was only 60 kilometers away from Bavaria. To be a ‘dissident’ there, at the age of 15 or so, was absolutely obligatory, otherwise one would have been considered an absolute loser, even a freak. That was naturally hammered into our brains by the BBC, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, West German television channels like ARD and ZDF. We were all listening to Radio Luxemburg, to Bavaria 3, we read ‘samizdat’ literature.

Pilsen is a little town of 180,000 people, known for its heavy industry and beer, but when I was a child, it had a permanent opera house, countless libraries including a science one, several small avant-garde theatres (which, yes, all tried to put on stage something that could be read ‘between the lines’), great bookstores, 6 cinemas, including an excellent cine-club where we basically saw all the great existential and experimental films from Europe, Japan, U.S. and Latin America.

Communist Czechoslovakia was to some extent gray, but extremely well educated, cultural and actually, really fun.

The coward Sylvester Stallone one of Hollywood's great phonies as Rambo. The author was influenced by his lies but lived to tell—even sly, filthy propaganda of the worst sort can be overcome.

When I first visited Italy, I was shocked by its slums around Naples, by the sad lot of African immigrants. But I was conditioned to see the world as it was presented by Western propaganda. I protested against the ‘occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union’, because that is what the World Service of the BBC prepared me to do. Despite being educated on great literature, poetry and music, I saw Rambo as a freedom fighter, and Maggie Thatcher as a liberator of the ‘free world’.

I still somehow believed in the ideals of the Soviet Union, in the internationalism. But my brain was fried – it was a goulash that consisted of pseudo images coming like an avalanche from the West, and of solid and the not too colorful reality of socialist Czechoslovakia.

My two Czech uncles were true internationalists, and they built sugar mills, steel mills, pharmaceutical factories and other great things, in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and China. They did it with honest zeal and the love for humanity. I considered them to be two losers, idiots, ‘fanatics’. In reality, they were great people, and I was simply sick, brainwashed and blind then!

Then, as now, Western propaganda spat at everything pure, altruistic, and honest. Western media is scared of true heroes, of people who are helping others to gain independence, of strong, truly free men and women.

I emigrated. I wrote total shit, my first book of poetry, I got involved in the Solidarity movement in neighboring Poland, hit the bottle while chain smoking some 50 cigarettes a day, and emigrated. Or more precisely, I was kicked out, or whatever… You know, a Soviet kid in Czechoslovakia, writing dissident stuff… It was embarrassing, so they just suggested I go to the West, where I loved it so much.

I went. To make my story short, after I got my political asylum in the US, I was at Columbia University Film School in New York City, when the U.S. performed its first strike against Libya.

That week was crucial. Film Faculty students quickly clarified to me, what was going on, in regard to Libya. Then, in the pub, they asked me about those ‘bread lines’ in Czechoslovakia. I humbly explained about all the sorts of delicious fresh-baked breads available in Pilsen, but they couldn’t believe me. They kept asking about censorship… I was much better read than they were, and apart from Hollywood productions, I had seen more great films, but that, again, was shocking to my new friends.

From the windows of East Campus, we watched the endless fires burning in Harlem. It was pre-Clinton Harlem, real tough stuff.

All around me, in New York, I saw misery, despair, discontent, but also total obedience and resignation. But there was no ‘going back’.

I began visiting Harlem, by car service, as no yellow cab would take me there. I discovered a little wonderful jazz club, the Baby Grand. I would drink there and listen to jazz, and at night I’d cry holding onto the owner, a big African-American mama. I still remember one night; puke all over the floor, and spilt beer. “I was so stupid!” I howled! “I was such a fool!” She caressed my hair and repeated: “Hush… It could be much worse. My people have had it much, much worse… Be strong, young man!” I was 19… Or 20, I forgot. In Harlem, they clearly explained to me, what America is.

Later I was married into a multi-millionaire’s family in Texas, and I saw what was going on ‘inside’. The oil, the hatred of ‘big government’. As a simultaneous interpreter (I was moonlighting doing that work, supporting my writing), I was present during some of the most horrible negotiations between the Western ‘private sector’ and what was then left of the Soviet Union, and then Russia. What the West did to my country, to the Soviet Union and then to Yeltsin’s Russia, was theft, just shameless looting. In those days, I was making over 1,000 dollars per day, ++. I quickly understood what capitalism was, and imperialism. I wanted to die. I almost killed myself. I ran. I ran away from all that. I ran to Peru, to write about then the most brutal civil war on Earth. I hit the road. I shed all my identity. I became an internationalist. And I never stopped being one.

And I never returned to Europe or to the United States in order to live there. I only come to show my films, to launch my books, or to give one or two insulting speeches, as I did two years ago at the Italian Parliament in Rome.

It took some time to understand. I did. After living and working in more than 160 countries, after listening to tens of thousands of real stories, after almost losing my life on at least ten occasions, I understood.

I understand perfectly well, and I despise profoundly, what Western propaganda has done to the world. And I fight it, with all my might, day and night, for those millions, for billions of boys and girls, who are now, like me so many years ago, getting thoroughly indoctrinated, lobotomized and brainwashed by brutal professionals in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

*

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] say and write what I want to say, what I want to write.

I also say and write what thousands of people whom I have met, in Asia, Oceania, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, want me to convey. They cannot do it themselves, they are too lost, too debilitated, too confused. They tell me the stories, not even hoping that anything can ever change or improve. They believe that their misfortune is permanent and fatal.

Then, I write my ‘propaganda’ pieces! I take sides. I speak of the horrors created by the Western neo-colonialist regime. Am I ‘subjective’? You bet! And I am telling you openly that I am.

I am an Internationalist, a Cuban-style internationalist. I am not hiding what I am. It is all honestly spelled out in my essays, in my profiles, in my books.

I ‘propagandize’ what I think, in what I believe. In fact, I’d much rather be called a ‘propagandist’ than a journalist, which is, lately, synonymous with ‘the oldest profession’.

People who are like me, are free, and they write, speak, make films, precisely as they want.

If we join the Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Venezuelans – we do it because that is what we want, because we think that what they are doing right now is generally right. It is not a job, it is a struggle, a battle, a true life!

Tough, not easy, but life, which I’d never trade for anything else.

Communist Czechoslovakia was to some extent gray, but extremely well educated, cultural and actually, really fun.

They pretend that they are ‘objective’, while no ‘objectivity’ can really exist in this time and age, particularly not in the West. They are hiding their true shameful trade behind their impeccable Oxford accents. They are still getting great mileage from being white.

They simply lie, openly and shamelessly, solely by refusing to openly admit who is paying them, what is expected of them, and what would happen to their careers in case they’d dare to tell or write the truth.

*

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]y propaganda is my own. Or it is designed (by myself) to help my comrades, and the countries and governments that I admire and support.

Am I fully objective? Please read this carefully: “NO! Definitely not. And I am not aiming at any false objectivity! I select the places where I go, I select the stories that I want to cover. That is how I ‘maneuver’ politically. But once there, once at the frontline, I tell the truth, and I produce images that simply cannot lie!”

My opponents from the Western mass media, from their governments, multi-nationals and advertising companies, are lying day and night. And they never admit what game they are playing.

That is why their propaganda is ‘bigger’ than mine.

I freely write what I think is correct, and my readers are reading my stuff freely (or sometimes even despite great obstacles).

My adversaries from the West, are using the lowest state and business apparatus, even fear, to penetrate people with their lies. They have psychologists, demagogues, business gurus at their disposal: to help with spreading their fabrications all over the world.

Technically, they are so good at what they are doing, that even the poorest of the poor, even those who have already been robbed of everything, are readily buying into their ‘worldview’. Just go to Kenya or to Indonesia, go to the slums there, and you will see.

For many of the victims, the greatest honor is still to become as indoctrinated (and well-spoken) as those who have already robbed the world of almost everything.

This, my dear Comrades, is an outcome of perfectly successful and evil propaganda!

I’m terribly sorry, but I’m sticking to my own. My propaganda may be perhaps transparent, Imperfect and raw, but it is sincere.

And I’m not afraid, at night, to look in the mirror!