CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Hollywood is a giant propaganda mill which when it isn’t cranking out movies which are literally funded and controlled by the US war machine is putting on spectacular ninety-minute “The imperialist world order is perfectly sane and capitalism is totally working” infomercial presentations. It is an arm of cultural control which is unrivaled by anything else in this world, so of course it has powerful forces at work within it ensuring status quo loyalism.
VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
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What is ‘social democracy’? (A comprehensive examination)
18 minutes readBY MONTHLY REVIEW ONLINE—SOCIAL DEMOCRACY: Look up the term in a dictionary and you’ll find a definition something along the lines of “an ideology that advocates or supports political, social and economic interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a representative democracy and capitalist economy.” Most “social democrats” (such as members of the Lib Dems today) would agree with that. Social democracy often presents itself as a “centrist” movement, opposing what it labels the “extremes” of left as well as right.
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ALASTAIR CROOKE—Let us consider Turkey: Its leadership has tossed aside its mask. Ah yes, Turkey has been supporting (moderate?) Islamist opponents to President Assad? But, suddenly, the mask is gone — “Idlib is ours” (i.e. is Turkish). “Aleppo like Hatay, is Turkish too”. Neo-Ottomanism; pan-Turkicism. Yes, the Arab world has noticed, and Gulf States are quickly making good with Damascus against this neo-Ottomanism.
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HERBERT SCHILLER: The Packaged Consciousness
71 minutes readHERBERT SCHILLER–The fundamental similarity of the informational material and cultural messages that each of the mass media independently transmits makes it necessary to view the communications systern as a totality. The media are mutually and continuously reinforcing. Since they operate according to commercial rules, rely on advertising, and are tied tightly to the corporate economy and its worldview, both in their own structure and in their relationships with sponsors, the media constitute an industry, not an aggregation of independent, freewheeling informational entrepreneurs, each offering a highly individualistic product. By need and by design, therefore, the images and messages they purvey, are, with few exceptions, constructed to achieve similar objectives, which are, simply put, profitability and the affirmation and maintenance of the private ownership consumerist society.
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JEFF J. BROWN—The US’s military biowarfare program, DARPA, is in the business to genocidally exterminate Western enemies with Frankenstein viruses and bacteria. It’s what they do. It’s their raison d’être and your Eurangloland taxes are paying for it. DARPA is the one that has been creating mutant coronaviruses from bat sources for years (https://www.unz.com/wwebb/bats-gene-editing-and-bioweapons-recent-darpa-experiments-raise-concerns-amid-coronavirus-outbreak/). This can only lead to one conclusion: SARS and Covid-19 were developed in bioweapon laboratories. With these viruses targeting ethnic Chinese, one can safely assume that foreign elements who perceive China to be an enemy to be destroyed, were the ones who developed it.