ZIONCONS

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—So there’s a total media blackout on this story from the usual plutocratic news outlets, which is a huge story in and of itself. Just as significantly, the less well-known propagandists who are typically the first to attack any argument which casts doubt on the “Assad is a child-gassing monster who must be stopped at all cost” imperial narrative have been incredibly feeble in their attempts to dispute this new revelation.Bellingcat is a pro-NATO narrative management firm which has defended ridiculous Syria regime change propaganda like the Bana Alabed psyop, and is consistently elevated with fawning puff pieces and collaborative  reports from major mass media outlets like the Guardian and the New York Times. As of this writing it has published absolutely nothing on the Engineering Assessment.

An extensive independent investigation revealed the rampant use of “automation, coordinated inauthentic behavior and cyborgs” to position anti-government hashtags on Twitter, with some accounts tweeting hundreds of thousands of times per day and generating billions of daily impressions. The Venezuelan opposition has consistently looked to fire up social media ahead of potential flashpoints, while, on the other hand, official or pro-government accounts have routinely been shut down by Western social media giants, including seven Venezuelan government accounts being suspended by Twitter just recently.

CODEPINK’s co-founder Medea Benjamin was forcibly escorted out of the Hudson Institute Sept. 19, after disrupting warhawk Brian Hook, U.S. Special Envoy to Iran and head of Trump’s Iran Action Group. Her protest against Hook’s belligerent speech and the administration’s harsh sanctions struck a chord with people in Iran. #PeacewithIran #Iran CODEPINK has been bombarded via email and Instagram with messages from ordinary Iranians expressing their thanks and echoing the call for peace. “The messages from Iranians keep pouring in and are so beautiful,” said Benjamin. “People in both countries want to live in peace. We have to stop the Trump administration from dragging us into another unjustified, unwinnable, catastrophic conflict.”

ERIC ZUESSE—If a nation’s sole reason for producing weapons is in order to protect the public — a public purpose — then there is no reason for the government to lie so as to demonize foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad, Salvador Allende, Viktor Yanukovych, and Nicolas Maduro. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with how bad (or good) the demonized leader actually is.Why does the US government demonize those people, while simultaneously serving (if not actually installing) barbaric dictators such as King Saud, Augusto Pinochet, Castillo Armas, and the Shah? The publicly stated reasons are always ‘humanitarian’ (when not ‘national defense’ — and often, as in 2003 Iraq — both at once).