Human Rights Watch denounces Cuba for human rights violations
By Lucas Leiroz | February 9, 2021
Denunciations of human rights violations against Cuba have become routine in the West. For decades, governments, NGOs and activists have denounced the Cuban government for various attitudes of abuse of universal rights, but the sources of such reports and evidence of crimes remain weak and vague. Once again, the NGO Human Rights Watch issued a report warning of an alleged “abusive” situation with regard to human rights on the island – and again the evidence is weak and reveals an ideologized action.
Every year, Human Rights Watch releases its global reports, covering all regions of the planet and warning against alleged human rights violations worldwide. In its 2021 edition, published on January 13, in the topic dedicated to Cuba, several crimes were reported, including alleged arbitrary arrests on the island, lack of freedom of expression, presence of political prisoners in Cuban penitentiaries, travel restrictions and several others acts that are presented to international society as frequent and structural in Cuba.
There are explanations for Human Rights Watch’s frontal opposition to Cuba, which are little publicized in the international media. In the past, the Cuban government has accused the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) of funding more than 20 organizations to promote complaints and defamations against the Latin country, including HRW. NED’s ties to the CIA prompted the Cuban government to veto agents from organizations linked to the NED into the country. In fact, regardless of whether or not there is a plot against the island organized by the NED and the CIA, it is clear that HRW’s annual reports are focused on denouncing and criticizing emerging countries, especially non-aligned nations, anticipating coercive measures taken by the US and other Western powers. This led Havana to endorse the narrative that HRW creates justifications for subsequent coercive measures with its allegations of human rights violations.
The central problem for the credibility of HRW reports is the authenticity of the organization’s sources. The reports are based on data provided by anti-government activists who are ideologically committed to the end of communism and the triumph of American interests on the island. To this end, such activists, who work inside and outside Cuba, adulterate, exaggerate or even create data that does not correspond to the reality of the country, as has been reported several times by Havana. The speech of anonymous activists follows a model predefined by American agencies interested in the fall of the Cuban government. This speech is disseminated by human rights NGOs and finally justifies coercive measures by the American government. For this reason, Havana sees HRW as a threat to its national security and this will not change, even if Washington strengthens its sanctions further, as there is a central ideological incompatibility between these countries that cannot be overcome with mere coercive maneuvers.
Exaggeration is certainly the greatest weapon of these agents. Surely, there are human rights violations in Cuba – just as there are in any nation. There is no country that has been successful in completely abolishing acts contrary to human rights. Many nations may have officially abolished such practices, but they certainly still exist unofficially and, equally, deserve investigation and criticisms. However, this persecution against “human rights violators” is generally applied when the charged state is an emerging nation geopolitically opposed to Washington, like Cuba. In this way, NGOs like HRW observe cases of violation and exaggerate them, claiming that there is a state policy to confront universal rights, when, in fact, they are only marginal practices that exist in any country.
Just as mistakes are exaggerated, merits are ignored. Cuba has some of the best social indicators on the American continent, being a global reference in education and with some of the most qualified medical professionals in the world. Havana is responsible for several humanitarian missions sending doctors and equipment to nations in need of medical care, including not only poor countries, but developed states in emergencies, such as Italy during the pandemic. Furthermore, Cuba seems to be advanced in many agendas exalted in the West. For example, women occupy 51% of the deputies in the National Assembly and are 62% of the country’s scientists – which are remarkably high numbers by Western standards. These indices show that, with or without structural disrespect, there is undeniable progress in terms of human rights, and this cannot be ignored.
However, Havana is right to think that HRW’s reports are not by chance. What we should expect for the future is the resurgence of a focus of tensions between Washington and Havana. Trump, in his last days in government, reversed a process of rapprochement between the countries when he considered Cuba again as a terrorist financing nation – a totally unreasonable accusation and without any material evidence, which Trump certainly did not believe, but made this decision as a strategic maneuver to harm Biden and transfer power to his successor with more international tensions. Biden promised to review Trump’s policy against Cuba but gave no details of exactly what points he will reform. However, a peaceful policy for Havana was never expected from the new American president. Biden’s reforms are likely to occur, more likely, to facilitate the flow of migration and to include “humanitarian” issues in relations, shifting the focus of tensions from a security and defense perspective to one of respect for human rights and democracy.
In practice, this means that Biden must try to harm Cubans even more by imposing international sanctions in order to force Havana to comply with humanitarian standards that are already respected but whose compliance will never be recognized by NGOs committed to the American government.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
The shaky science behind the “deadly new strains” of Sars-Cov-2
By Rosemary Frei | OffGuardian | February 8, 2021
According to what we hear from officials and the mainstream media, the new variants are the most dangerous and unpredictable beings since Osama bin Laden.
Everyone needs to stay safe from these invisible but murderously mighty microbes by shunning contact with the unwashed, unmasked and unvaccinated.
But is that drastic approach — which is accompanied by severe curtailment of civil liberties and constitutional rights — warranted?
It turns out that the case for the variants’ contagiousness and dangerousness centres largely on the theoretical effects of just one change said to stem from a mutation in the virus’s genes. And, as I’ll show in this article, that case is very shaky.
I also have an accompanying nine-minute ‘explainer’ video, below:
Is it True that the New Variants are Very Dangerous? from Rosemary Frei on Vimeo.
That one change is known as N501Y — scientific shorthand for the substitution of one protein building block (amino acid) for another at position 501 in the part of the virus called the spike protein.
Specifically, position 501 lies in the portion of the spike protein that’s responsible for the intimate coupling between the virus and cells that lets the virus slip inside and multiply.
[Note that any such amino-acid switcheroo is correctly called a change, not a mutation. Mutations occur only in genes. For some reason many scientists and scribes who ought to know better are mistakenly calling N501Y and other amino-acid changes ‘mutations.’ ]
A very preliminary study published Dec. 22, 2020, suggested that N501Y also is present in the South African variant named 501Y.V2. And another very preliminary study, published January 12, 2021, asserted it was also present in the new strain emerging from the Brazilian jungle, dubbed P.1.
On top of that, the South African variant is being reported as evading immunity and B.1.1.7 sharing this escape route. And scientists are depicting new variants with N501Y on board as spreading very fast. Some say they make herd immunity impossible, so every single person on earth has to be vaccinated. The models also suggest B.1.1.7 is up to 91% deadlier than the regular novel coronavirus.
(Yet so far it seems the main basis for officials saying it’s more deadly is shown in the minutes of the Jan. 21, 2021 meeting of an influential UK committee called New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group [NERVTAG ]. There, they cite modeling papers which haven’t yet been published – which means that until they’re published there’s no way to check their work.)
THREE NON-PEER-REVIEWED THEORETICAL-MODELING PAPERS WHICH CATAPULTED VARIANTS INTO THE SPOTLIGHT
Public-health officials, politicians and the mainstream media around the world turned their collective headlights on the variants right after the publication of three theoretical-modeling papers on B.1.1.7, a variant originating in the U.K. The first was a Technical Briefing by Public Health England published Dec. 21 (it’s the first of an ongoing series of reports on the variant authored by people working at the agency and at other institutions), the second a paper published Dec. 23 by a mathematical-modeling group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the third a theoretical-modeling manuscript posted Dec. 31 by a large group of UK scientists.
None of the three papers was checked over for accuracy by objective observers – a process called ‘peer review.’ Nonetheless, all three were portrayed as solid science by many scientists, politicians, public-health officials and the press.
(I reached out for comment to Public Health England, as well as to the first author of the second paper Nicholas Davies, and to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The only reply I received was from a media-relations person at Public Health England; she told me no one was available for an interview.)
(Neil Ferguson was a co-author of the first and third papers. The UK government has relied on Ferguson’s mathematical modeling for many years. This is despite his work turning out to be highly inaccurate time after time. He also supposedly stepped down from his government-advisory role last May after being caught secretly meeting with his married lover during a time when it was illegal to make contact with anyone outside of one’s household, thanks in large part to his modelling. But he was quickly restored to positions of influence. In an article and accompanying video coming out next week, I describe the connections and conflicts of interest surrounding Ferguson and the modeling papers’ other authors.)
WHAT EFFECT IS N501Y SAID TO HAVE?
In N501Y, the amino acid that’s swapped out at position 501 in the spike protein is asparagine; by scientific convention it’s represented by the letter ‘N.’ The amino acid that’s swapped in in its place is tyrosine, and it’s represented by the letter ‘Y.’ Hence ‘N501Y.’
Position 501 in the amino-acid sequence sits in the part of the spike protein that protrudes from the surface of the virus. Specifically, it’s said to lie in the region of the spike protein that latches or ‘binds’ to the mechanism that is the gatekeeper for whether the virus can enter the cell. That gate-keeping mechanism is known as the ‘ACE2 receptor.’
This region of the spike protein – known as the ‘receptor binding domain’ (RBD) — binds to the gate keeping mechanism, the ACE2 receptor. When the RBD and the ACE2 receptor bind, the cell membrane, which is the circular barrier between the area outside the cell and the cell contents, opens up and allows the virus to enter.
N501Y is posited to make the spike protein bind tighter to the ACE2 receptor. Influential theoreticians have performed mathematical modeling based on this hypothesis. This modeling suggests that this tighter binding allows the virus to enter more easily, and that therefore this makes the virus more transmissible.
Yet as far as I’ve been able to find, there is still no concrete, direct proof of this. And note that epidemiological data cannot be used to definitively detect the effect of an amino-acid in a virus. Only experiments involving direct observation of the virus’s interaction with the body can determine that.
The main evidence that the top three theoretical-models cite as proof of stronger bonding between the N501Y form of the novel coronavirus and the RBD is from just three scientific manuscripts, and these describe experiments with the virus in mice or petri dishes, not observation of whether in fact the variants are truly more contagious or more deadly.
DETAILS OF THE THREE PAPERS THAT UNDERPIN THE ASSERTION THAT N501Y BOLSTERS CONTAGIOUSNESS
One of those three papers was published Sept. 25, 2020, in Science. It describe experiments involving involving six rounds of division of the virus in mice.
The researchers found a large amount of the virus in the mice lungs right from the first round of division. Based on this, they pronounced the virus to have “enhanced infectivity.” However, they didn’t actually test whether the virus is more transmissible/contagious – that is, whether it moves from mouse to mouse more easily.
They performed ‘deep sequencing’ and reported that they found the N501Y change in the ‘mouse-adapted’ virus. Next they did ‘structural remodeling’ on it and wrote that this analysis…
suggested that the N501Y substitution in the RBD of SARS-CoV[-2] S protein increased the binding affinity of the protein to mouse ACE2.
All of this is very different than direct observations of the variant virus’s behaviour in mice or humans.
The second paper was posted on bioRχiv on Dec. 21, 2020. It describes an “engineered decoy receptor for SARS-CoV-2.” The complicated series of molecular-biological manoeuvers in vitro were performed that is hard to follow and understand – there is no ‘Methods’ section laying out the details and sequence of what they did; rather, the researchers’ approach to their experiments is scattered across all sections of the paper including in the accompanying Supplementary Material. This is many steps removed from real-life situations. The authors conclude from their manoeuvers that laboratory-mutated novel coronavirus with the N501Y mutation seems to bind more tightly to their ‘engineered decoy’ form of the RBD receptor than the RBD receptor that normally occurs in nature. (The idea, it seems, is that this ‘engineered decoy’ could be injected into people with the goal of getting the new variant to bind to it rather than to cells, thereby stopping it from gaining entry into cells and reproducing.)
bioRχiv is an online-only journal. (It’s pronounced ‘bioarchive’; that’s because the Greek letter χ is pronounced ‘kai.’ I presume the letter χ is used in the journal’s title because the χ2 [‘chi-square’] test is a widely used form of statistical analysis in scientific papers.) The journal has the tagline ‘The Preprint Server for Biology.’ ‘Preprint’ means non-peer-reviewed. bioRχiv focuses entirely on Covid-19-papers and is sponsored by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. It has a sister publication medRχiv that also focuses on Covid-19,
The Initiative is the creation of Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. Facebook has been among the very active censors of information including scientific papers that diverge from the official narrative about Covid.
The third paper was posted on the website of the online journal bioRχiv on June 17, 2020, and then in Cell on Sept. 3, 2020.
Like the other two papers, it is extremely removed from direct observation of the virus’s behaviour in live animals or humans. In fact, the third paper doesn’t even use human or animal cells. It involves a ‘yeast-surface-display platform’ as a basis for performing ‘deep mutational scanning’ of the novel coronavirus’s RBD. That ‘platform’ is an artificial structure the paper’s authors constructed for measuring binding between antibodies and various RBD regions containing an array of mutations.
According to this paper, the N501Y amino-acid change results in stronger binding of the virus to the RBD.
However, the papers’ authors state in the last section of their paper that:
It is important to remember that our maps define biochemical phenotypes of the RBD, not how these phenotypes relate to viral fitness. There are many complexities in the relationship between biochemical phenotypes of yeast-displayed RBD and viral fitness.
Translation: “Just because our biochemistry experiments showed that the presence of N501Y or other changes in the RBD seems to make the RBD bind tighter to the ACE2 receptor, we don’t know whether any of these changes make the virus more ‘fit’/transmissible.”
And note also that one of the authors of the third paper, Allison Greaney, is quoted as saying in an August 2020 article from the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center where she and several of the other authors work, that:
The virus already has a ‘good enough’ ability to bind to ACE2. There’s no reason to believe that going beyond that level will make it more pathogenic or transmissible…[b]ut the RBD may be able to tolerate a number of mutations.
As another note, the third paper was first published in bioRχiv and then published three months later in the peer-reviewed journal Cell. In Cell the paper is labelled ‘Elsevier-Sponsored Documents’ (see image below) (Elsevier is the publishing empire that owns Cell, among hundreds of other journals). I couldn’t find anything online about what ‘Sponsored’ means, nor about what or who sponsored this particular paper; and I couldn’t find any other papers with this designation. So I emailed Cell’s PR manager John Caputo on the evening of Jan. 18 and followed up by leaving him a voicemail message on Jan. 19. I haven’t heard back from him.
‘Deep Mutational Scanning of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor Binding Domain Reveals Constraints on Folding and ACE2 Binding’ (Tyler N. Starr et al.)
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT ANOTHER AMINO-ACID CHANGE IN B.1.1.7
I’ll quickly turn to another of the key changes said to be present in B.1.1.7. This change, the deletion of three amino acids was described in a paper published on the website of medRχiv on November 13, 2020. (Earlier in this article I mention that medRχiv is a creation of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.)
The mutation purportedly makes B.1.1.7 invisible to one of the three key functions of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. That function is detection of the gene that has the genetic code for one of the two main spike proteins on the outer surface of the novel coronavirus.
However, that conclusion is based on only sequencing of the virus in a mere six people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. On top of that, the paper was not subjected to scrutiny by other scientists (a process known as ‘peer review’) before it was published.
In addition, the Covid diagnoses of those six people were themselves determined by PCR. And PCR has been shown to have a very high rate of false positives — that is, to very frequently give a positive result in people who in fact do not harbour the novel coronavirus at all.
The authors of that paper themselves conclude that:
this result should be interpreted with caution. As a limited number of samples with the S-negative profile [i.e., tests that were positive for two of the three portions of the PCR test but not for the third, S-gene, portion] were sequenced, we could not exclude the presence of other S mutations associated with this profile…. Moreover we could not determine whether the deletion affected the primer or other probe-binding region as their coordinates were not available.
It’s a good bet that similar sleights of hand are behind the new wave of papers and headlines focusing on the amino-acid change dubbed E484K.
WHAT’S THE LESSON FROM ALL THIS?
That the pronouncements about the dire danger posed by the new variants aren’t based on solid science.
They appear to be aimed more at scaring the public into submitting to harsher and longer restrictions than helping to create truly evidence-based policies.
So follow the golden rules. Read the primary scientific-paper sources. Analyze them and think for yourself. Don’t let your reasoning be swept away by the 24-7, fear-filled news cycle.
Coronavirus Skepticism: Pandemic Or Staged Pandemic?
Principia Scientific | February 8, 2021
A real COVID-19 pandemic is not taking place, if you adhere to the table of points below, which illustrate the key differences between a real pandemic and a fake one.
Any reasonable person performing a point-by-point appraisal of the list provided herein will likely conclude our governments and media are producers of fake news.
Introduced first under the sneaky pretext of ‘administrative assistance’ to accustom the population to the presence. The medicine dictatorship brings its infrastructure by means of deception step by step into position.
The mask requirement seems to serve solely to maintain the false belief in a real pandemic. It is perfidious psychological warfare against the population. It is escalated and expanded in stages (Overton window).
Test stations, mandatory tests, vaccination centers, internment camps for “quarantine offenders”, mandatory vaccination for everyone! The army is deployed domestically in violation of the Law.
It is not about health it is a national as well as global power grab by means of a large-scale constructed medical pretext. Theoretical computer models, manipulative testing (PCR testing), downgraded pandemic definition (WHO), artificial ICU bed shortages, financial incentives (IMF) for CovID diagnosis, and false reporting in the controlled media.
It doesn’t take a virus it just takes fear of a virus! The swine flu vaccine (2009) resulted in severe neurological damage and millions of dollars in lawsuits. Under no circumstances get vaccinated because of “CovID”!
Especially please not children. That would be a grave mistake. The new mRNA vaccines cause autoimmune diseases and literally mutate people into GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms), which has far-reaching negative consequences.
The media is purposefully using fear and scare tactics, there is no fact-based reason to be afraid. We are being lied to and manipulated into an artificial hysteria to accept laws that violate human rights.
- Do your own research
- Discover truth
- Overcome Stockholm syndrome
- Put down muzzles
- Ignore lockdowns
- Open for business
Practice civil disobedience and collectively reject criminal government orders. Adapt and emerge stronger from crisis. Hold those responsible accountable. For a normality worth living for. NO to the pandemic hoax! NO to medical dictatorship! RESIST!
Big Media v. Marjorie Greene and Lou Dobbs
By Stephen Lendman | February 7, 2021
Instead of exposing and denouncing 2020 election rigging for Biden over Trump, establishment media cheerled the outcome.
They’ve been hostile toward everything Trump related and his supporters.
Instead of slamming what happened to Rep. Marjorie Greene and Fox News host Lou Dobbs, they expressed support for the constitutional breach of their First Amendment rights.
The hostile to truth and full disclosure NYT slammed Greene as an “QAnon congresswoman, a far-right influencer and gun fanatic who dabbles in anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bigotry,” followed by a further litany of over-the-top remarks that were all about her support for Trump.
Bezos owned, CIA-linked WaPo called her a “dangerous (GOP) crackpot (with an) extensive history of offensive conspiracy theorizing.”
According to WaPo, the Times, and other Big Media, Trump supporters are crackpot right-wing extremists for daring to challenge the official narrative — especially about the 9/11 mother of all US state-sponsored false flags, its imperial wars, and 2020 election rigging for Biden over DJT.
The Times called what led to stripping her of committee assignments “another chapter in an ongoing story: the two-step between the far right and the Republican Party and the degree to which the former is never actually that far from the latter.”
Ignored by the Times and other Big Media is that both wings of US one-party rule are hostile to an open, free society — undemocratic Dems outdistancing Republicans on issues related to warmaking on humanity at home and abroad.
WaPo said “Republicans should have sidelined” Greene straightaway, calling her appointment to House committees “abhorrent,” adding:
Support by most GOP “colleagues (is) one more sign of the… morally adrift party.”
“Thursday’s vote should never have had to happen.”
“Republicans should have had more self-respect than to support her last year, to welcome her with full honors and to allow the situation to escalate as it did.”
If Greene was anti-Trump, pro-Biden/Harris, demonizing articles about her by WaPo and the Times never would have been written.
The Times expressed support for action by Fox News to cancel Lou Dobbs Tonight.
In typical Times disinformation fashion, it called his program a “clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race (sic).”
There’s nothing “baseless” about indisputable election fraud — supported by the Times instead of exposing and denouncing it.
The Times cited an unnamed source — that may or may not exist because of dubious anonymity — allegedly saying:
“Dobbs’ extreme and unrepentant endorsements of Mr. Trump’s false election claims had imperiled his position.”
There’s nothing remotely false about claims proved true by indisputable evidence.
Like the Times, WaPo called Dobbs a “promoter of Trump’s false election fraud claims” — that evidence proved true no matter how hard Big Media try sweeping what’s indisputable under the rug.
Reached by WaPo text message on Friday, Dobbs said he had “no comment at this time.”
Until the unacceptable lawsuit is resolved, his lawyer(s) surely advised against commenting on the issue publicly.
Corporate controlled voting machines manipulate US election results with electronic ease.
Other techniques include ballot box stuffing, undercounting, double-counting, disenfranchising unwanted voters, demonizing candidates considered unacceptable by powerful interests, among other dirty tricks to prevent democratic outcomes.
Dirty tricks have been longstanding in US federal, state and local elections since at least the early 19th century.
Today’s sophisticated software makes losers winners and the other way around with nary a fingerprint to trace.
Throughout his time in office, Trump has been wrong on one issue after another.
On all things Election 2020 he’s right, brazen fraud deprived him of another term.
History one day will set things straight when it’s too late to matter except for the official record.
Biden/Harris entered office illegitimately — selected, not elected on January 20 while winner Trump was en route to Florida aboard Air Force One for the last time.
The Mainstream Bubble
By Ralf Arnold, translation by S. Robinson | OffGuardian | February 6, 2021
At the beginning of the already memorable year 2020, a term forced its way into public and private consciousness, which should increasingly determine and overshadow all of our lives: The “novel corona virus”, also called SARS-CoV-2. The name was officially announced by the WHO on February 11th. After that everything happened in quick succession.
At first I saw the pictures of Chinese people with masks only in the Tagesschau (the flagship evening news program by ARD, one of the two main public broadcasters in Germany; S.R.), which was not an unusual sight, but soon corona also reached our newsroom.
On the day when the first suspected corona case surfaced in our region, I was urged by our news chief to use it as a “lead story”, i.e. as the first report in the next news program.
At that time I was already extremely skeptical and found it excessive to use a mere suspected case as the lead story. However, I couldn’t escape the general excitement around me and put the message on “one”. But a bad feeling remained and that should intensify massively over the next few weeks.
A dynamic set in that seemed unstoppable.
More and more suspected cases, then confirmed corona cases, at some point the first death in Germany, some time later the first in our region. And more and more I noticed that not only colleagues, but also people in my private environment let themselves be infected by a vague fear and even panic.
Not that I dismissed the deaths, the so-called “corona deaths”, but didn’t we have many deaths in every flu epidemic, especially among the elderly? I checked our archives and found that we had only a handful of reports in three months during the 2018 flu epidemic. More than 25,000 people are said to have died of the flu at that time.
The now famous Johns Hopkins University dashboard was quickly featured on all television and online news. The so-called “new infections” were simply accumulated on this. It became clear to me that the graph with the constantly rising curve contained more psychological effects rather than factual information. In this way the curve could never sink again, in the best case it would stay horizontal. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone.
Part of the basic training of a journalist is that he never reports figures without meaningful reference. He must always provide comparisons, references and proportionalities so that the viewer / listener / reader can contextualise the information. I stuck to it for many years, and it seemed a matter of course for other journalists too. However, I saw this basic principle practically vanish into thin air in the first weeks of the pandemic. Absolute numbers, always only absolute numbers, without any meaningful reference.
To this day, people like to say that the USA is the country most severely affected by corona, with mere reference to the absolute numbers of infections and deaths, regardless of the size of the population, to which the numbers are rarely put in relation.
AN OMINOUS ALLIANCE
Our newsroom also adopted all these counting methods with a sleepwalking naturalness. Everything that was communicated by the health authorities, the district administration and the regional government was adopted and reported without questioning and without doubt. Almost all critical distance disappeared, and the authorities became supposed allies in the fight against the virus.
I have to point out, however, that I have never been called or written to directly by politicians to influence me in any way. There were only the usual press releases from the ministries and offices, which are of course written from their point of view. Nor have I been pressured by superiors, at least not directly. The whole thing is far more subtle, as will be shown.
March was the start of the first restrictions: major events were banned and soon after the first lockdown was imposed. Almost all journalists of the “mainstream”, so the so-called “leading media”, including my editorial team, seemed to immediately develop an ‘inhibition to bite’ towards politicians and the authorities. Why this uncritical reluctance among journalists?
I can only explain it to myself that particularly the pictures from Bergamo and New York also put the experienced editors and reporters into an emotional state of shock, even if they might not admit it. But they, too, are only people who are afraid of illness and death, or who worry about elderly or sick relatives; this was repeatedly an issue in conversations with colleagues. They rallied around the government, the RKI (Robert-Koch-Institute; the German equivalent of the CDC; S.R.) and the health authorities, as if one really had to stick together now to combat this dire, external threat.
You couldn’t throw a club between the legs of those in charge, who were having a difficult time already, by fundamentally questioning their measures – that was how the attitude seemed to me.
In our conversations, too, it was said more and more frequently that “the government is really doing a good job”. Most were firmly convinced that the lockdown and the restrictions of our fundamental rights were necessary and certainly only temporary. I heard only a few skeptical voices.
And then there were the TV interviews with politicians. Esteemed journalists, who in conversation with politician XY eagerly nodded and verbally agreed when they presented their assessment of the situation and made their demands. I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears!
What was the motto of the legendary television journalist Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs?
“You can recognize a good journalist by the fact that he does not make common cause with anything, not even with a good cause; that he is everywhere, but doesn’t belong anywhere.”
There was nothing left of this guiding principle, and very little in the way of tough and critical inquiries. But even that didn’t seem to bother anyone, yes to not even attract attention.
A DECAY OF REPORTING LANGUAGE
In the news of all the leading media, including ours, important, little words like “alleged”, “supposed”, “apparently” suddenly died out. For example, the Tagesschau said that Twitter wanted to delete “false information about corona” in the future. There is clearly no “alleged” or “supposed” as an addition, because it is assumed that Twitter can judge without any doubt what is false and what is correct information in terms of the corona virus (or in general). Which of course is absurd.
Sometimes I made my colleagues in the newsroom aware of such things and sometimes even earned a nod of approval, but often just a helpless shrug.
In this day and age, news reports need to be short, easy to understand, and interesting. We have been trained to do this for many years. This has a lot of advantages, namely the ease of understanding on the part of the consumer. But there are also significant disadvantages, namely that the news reports are written more and more simplistically. Deeper connections and backgrounds or complicated differentiations are increasingly disappearing. The trick is to shorten and omit.
From early summer, one could increasingly observe the phenomenon that the corona virus and the measures against it were equated in the media. For example, it was said: “Because of the corona pandemic, the municipalities are collecting significantly less taxes” or: “The WHO fears that the corona pandemic will plunge one and a half million more people into poverty.”
This is wrong, because not the pandemic, but the lockdowns have this effect, regardless of whether they are justified and appropriate. By ignoring this distinction, however, the anti-corona measures of the governments are being turned into something inevitable and without alternative and are no longer called into question.
The cause and therefore the scapegoat is always the virus, not politics.
This practice also crept into our newsroom. Advice from me was kindly noted, but nobody really took it to heart. I had the freedom to formulate this differently, but again nobody seemed to notice the small but subtle difference.
It is also often said that Covid-19 patients in the intensive care units “have to be ventilated”. Have to? They are being ventilated, that’s the fact. The attending doctor has to decide whether this is really medically necessary, and this question is quite controversial. There are a number of well-known experts who warn against intubating too quickly. So here too, as a journalist, you should remain neutral.
THE DREADFUL NUMBER OF “NEW INFECTIONS”
In spring 2020 I began to increasingly question the counting method of the RKI and thus also of the government. I pointed out to my superiors that all numbers such as the “new infections” reported daily or the “R-value” were basically worthless if we did not relate them back to the number of tests performed. They took note of this, but thought no further verification or inquiries were necessary, because the trend of rapidly increasing numbers could not be misunderstood, regardless of how much was tested, it said.
The number of so-called “new infections” rose from week 11 to week 12 from 8,000 to 24,000. At the end of March, the RKI announced (after multiple inquiries by the online magazine Multipolar ) that the number of PCR tests had almost tripled from 130,000 to 350,000 during the same period. The relative increase in new infections was thus far less than the absolute. There had been no “exponential increase”.
When the number of “new infections” continued to fall in early summer, the politicians still constantly conjured up the risk of the “second wave” if one were to ease the efforts – that is to say, the restrictions contrary to fundamental rights. In fact, most of my colleagues also agreed with these fears, while to me – who was no less of a medical and epidemiological layperson – it was pretty clear that there would be no second wave in summer, but an even bigger in autumn / winter because that is when the number of respiratory diseases routinely increase sharply. It was easy to foresee.
The whole issue of the PCR tests and the alleged “new infections” has to this day not been questioned by the leading media. Although over time there have been more and more studies and statements by virological and epidemiological experts harshly criticising the PCR test and its particular use, hardly any of it has penetrated our mainstream bubble. The Cycle Threshold values that were probably far too high in the tests, which give ample room to possible manipulation, were not an issue at all.
I suspect a lot of my colleagues haven’t even heard of it.
In general, the terms continue to be mixed up in this context. Even after ten months of corona, many colleagues still do not seem to know the difference between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the lung disease Covid-19. “Infected” (that is, those who have tested positive) are often equated with “sick”, regardless of whether they have symptoms or not.
The term “recovered” is also adopted uncritically by the authorities, although it implies that those affected were actually all sick, which is highly doubtful: On the one hand because there is most likely a proportion of false-positive test results that should not be underestimated, and, on the other hand, because many “infected” people do not develop any symptoms at all and it is therefore very dubious to call them sick.
SELECTIVE PERCEPTION AND HERD INSTINCT
In the meantime, all kinds of regulations have been introduced in our broadcasting corporation: mask requirements, physical distancing between desks, many colleagues have moved to home office, disinfectants everywhere and so on. This and the regular, ominous-sounding situation assessments by the management, of course, still exert a psychological influence and pressure on every employee. A subtle fear is built up here too, whether intentionally or unintentionally. There is literally an invisible threat in the air that is difficult to shield yourself from.
In addition, television screens are running in the newsroom and in other offices, on which reports about corona are broadcast almost continuously.
Everywhere reporters, pictures from intensive care units, running texts with the latest, ever higher numbers – it is almost impossible to avoid this influence. In addition, there are the newspapers and agency reports that also constantly report on corona, here a study, there another apocalyptic warning from a politician, and again and again sad individual stories which are particularly highlighted.
Although we continue to have daily conferences, now mostly by telephone, right from the start – at least during the conferences in which I participated – the current narrative of the national and regional government was never fundamentally questioned, namely that we have an extremely dangerous pandemic that can only be controlled, or at least slowed down, by tough government measures. Why is that?
Everyone probably knows the effect of “selective perception”. For example, if you or your wife are pregnant, you will most likely see more and more pregnant women on the street. Or if you fall in love with someone who drives a certain make of car, then you suddenly discover that make of car, in the same color, permanently on the streets. This effect also occurs in journalism.
Years ago, for example, there was a serious incident in Germany with several attack dogs biting a three-year-old girl to death. At that time there was great shock, a political discussion about the consequences was set in motion, a “character test” for dogs and stricter rules for dog owners were demanded, the media reported about it for days and weeks. And at the same time, suddenly more and more cases of dog attacks were reported. Sudden reports of even very minor incidents came from the police.
One would have thought that all dogs in Germany, like Hitchcock’s birds, would have agreed to meet for a general attack.
What happened? The general perception had become sensitised and extremely focused, on all levels. A dachshund bit someone in the calf in the park, they immediately reported this to the police and reported the owner, the police immediately passed the report on to the press, which turned it into a news report, although it was ultimately a triviality.
Due to the alarmed attitude and the narrowed perception of all those involved, however, the triviality that would normally have fallen under the table was given an oversized significance. And the readers, listeners or viewers noticed and thought: “Not again! This is piling up now.”
The same effect can of course also be observed in crime reporting. The media user can get the impression, for example, that the situation in the country is getting worse and more dangerous and that you can hardly dare go out in the streets. It might very well be that the pure statistics show that the total number of violent crimes continues to decline. That contradicts the subjective impression, but strangely enough, hardly anyone calms down. The pictures and reports of individual fates weigh far more than the sober numbers.
You can guess what I’m getting at.
In my opinion, in the corona crisis we are basically experiencing the same effect in a global, completely exaggerated and downright paranoid dimension. And that affects just about everyone: the common man, the police officer, the journalist, the politician and even the doctor and the scientist. Nobody is per se free from it. Unless he breaks free and dares to think for himself and think outside the box.
But there is a widespread journalistic herd instinct. Most journalists look at the daily newspapers that are delivered to the editorial office every day. And of course these are all newspapers that are mainstream: Welt, FAZ, Frankfurter Rundschau, Süddeutsche [the leading national papers; S.R.] and the regional newspapers.
In the evening, one watches “heute” [the evening news program of ZDF, the second of the two main public broadcasters in Germany; S.R.] and the “Tagesschau”, followed by the relevant talk shows, from Anne Will to Maischberger [two of the leading talk shows; S.R.] Mainstream almost always dominates there too. Real critics of the corona narrative are, with rare exceptions, categorically not invited.
Still, most of the journalists I know are of the opinion that the discussions there are quite controversial. But they do not notice – for lack of comparison – that these controversies are only fig-leaf discussions. It is only discussed when and to what extent the measures should be relaxed, but the corona narrative itself remains untouched.
All of this is not to say that there is no disease or death, but the perception of this is downright neurotically excessive. There are many reports on the Internet from the last few years that describe completely overcrowded hospitals, intensive care units at the limit and overburdened crematoria. With appropriate media support, one could have caused great panic in the population back then.
Another effect is that the media now also present their journalistic content online. There it is easier and faster for everyone to access than would be the case with hardcopy newspapers and broadcasts on radio or television. This means that this content can be easily copied and adopted.
As long as it is not personal, lengthy reporting or comments, but “only” news reports, it is easy to copy-paste these into your own reports, at least parts of them. Again and again you can find almost identical formulations and messages from different providers. Even if one does not copy-paste, one is tempted to orient oneself at the selection of topics by colleagues from other leading media.
A PERFIDIOUS FRAMING
I cannot say for sure whether the corona virus can be proven with the PCR tests, where it ultimately comes from, how dangerous it really is and what the right measures are to be taken against it. But this not what this is about. I do not deny that there is a bad illness, that people die from it and that you have to take it seriously.
And that brings us to the next emotive word, the so-called “corona denier” (Corona-Leugner). A term that has been gaining ground since the summer and is now regularly used by the mainstream media to label critics of the government’s anti-corona measures. The comparison with the “God denier” and the “Holocaust denier” is obvious.
While the term “God denier” has long been history, at least in our society, the term “Holocaust denier” is still relevant and it is no coincidence that the “corona denier” is involuntarily associated with it. There is now broad consensus that one cannot deny God at all, but only not believe in him. The “Holocaust denier” is the only generally recognized exception in which journalists use the word “deny”. Otherwise it is a taboo, at least it should be. Quite simply because it contains “lie” (lügen) in the stem of the word and thus implies a lie.
Responsible journalists know that defendants never deny the allegations in court, they contest them. This should be the case even after a final judgment, because courts can also be wrong and lawsuits can be reopened.
The term “corona denier” is now infamous in three ways. Firstly because of the linguistic similarity to the socially ostracized “Holocaust denier”, secondly because the corona critics are generally claimed to deny the existence of the virus (which is not the case with the vast majority of them) and finally because they are also accused of conscious lying. This is not just bad style, it is perfidious and ensures that the rifts in society are deepened even further.
An equally dubious term used as defamatory framing is that of the “conspiracy theorist”. It basically says everything and nothing. It can be someone who believes in chem trails or that the Americans’ moon landing was only staged, but it can also be someone who exposes a Watergate scandal or who claims (as happened) that Iraq did not hoard any weapons of mass destruction, and who is later confirmed in his assumptions.
Basically every investigative journalist has to be partly a conspiracy theorist, because of course the rulers of this world do not want to have all their activities published and therefore keep them secret. In this respect, it is somewhat grotesque that the media adopt the rulers’ fighting term and use it thoughtlessly.
Alleged conspiracy theorists are also made fun of internally. Many colleagues are joking that they are crazies, who believe that Bill Gates wants to open a vaccination station with Hitler on the back of the moon. Or similar childish nonsense.
A negative highlight was the reporting of the “leading media” about the large demonstrations in Stuttgart, Leipzig and especially Berlin in the summer. It started with the number of participants. Actually, it is common for journalists to name both the number of demonstrators as announced by the police and the number of demonstrators as announced by the organisers (which is naturally always higher) at rallies.
On August 1st 2020 in Berlin, however, these details diverged so widely that one had to become suspicious. The “leading media” solved the problem by only naming the small number from the police and ignoring the high numbers that the organisers and participants mentioned. How high the number actually was is still unclear today, but here too the media acted against journalistic practices.
Were a few right-wing radicals and Reich citizens among the demonstrators? Were there many or were they even dominating the action? Numerous video streams showed that a large, if not overwhelming, proportion of the demonstrators apparently came from the middle of society. On average a little older, educated and from a middle-class background. There are also surveys and studies that confirm this.
Of course, you can argue about it, but in our editorial team, too, the matter was clear: the focus of the reporting was clearly on the right-wing radicals and Reichsbürger.
One reason for this can be found in the increasingly important part of online media. In contrast to newspapers, television and radio, it is possible to analyse exactly how many hits an individual post has, or how many “likes” on the Facebook pages, which are now also operated by all leading media.
As a result, the spectacular, and the supposedly scandalous, comes more and more to the fore because it promises more attention and thus more clicks. Various media critics say that almost everything in our society is increasingly being scandalised, no matter how casual. If so, then it is surely largely due to the “leading media” (including their tabloids).
A SEALED BUBBLE
Why is the “mainstream media” a closed bubble? Because they always get their information from the same, pre-sorted sources – and that is largely the news agencies that belong to the same bubble. They are like the gatekeepers of published opinion. That has always been the case, of course, but in the corona crisis it has become clearer than ever.
The major agencies mainly report on what supports the official corona narrative and what is propagated and implemented by the vast majority of governments around the world.
For example, almost only studies from around the world are reported which highlight the danger of the virus and the effectiveness of tough government measures. A Chinese study of around ten million people in Wuhan, which found that non-symptomatic transmission of the virus (almost all government measures are based on this assumption) was as good as irrelevant, did not feature in the agencies. It could only be found in the alternative online media.
By contrast, a study by the US-American CDC, which had contrary results, was reported. Numerous studies that showed that government lockdowns have virtually no impact on the infection rate have also been ignored by the agencies so far.
For me personally in my work this means that I cannot use any studies or information that I have found by myself on the Internet, because I would almost certainly be accused of using an uncertain source. But if DPA, AP, AFP or Reuters reported the study, I would be more or less on the safe side and could report it. If there were inquiries, I would refer to the agency. This could still lead to discussions as to whether the study is credible and whether it is worth reporting, but that would be part of a normal journalistic decision-making process.
Yes, it does happen again and again that critical experts or politicians are interviewed in the leading media or that the RKI and the federal government are criticized. But mostly it’s just fig leaves and they don’t really get to the heart of the matter.
There are statements from leading editors-in-chief of the public services that say that people like Wolfgang Wodarg or Sucharit Bhakdi [two high-profile critics with an accomplished medical / research background; S.R.] are generally not to be invited to talk shows on the subject. The bubble should stay as tightly sealed as possible.
AN ATTEMPT AT AN EXPLANATION
Again and again I wonder why almost all of my colleagues so willingly and uncritically adopt this narrative from the government and from a few scientists (selected by the government) and disseminate it further. As already mentioned, concern for your own health or that of relatives certainly plays a role. But there is more.
In the last few years, something called “attitude journalism” has emerged. It is an intellectual and moralising arrogance that I think is spreading more and more. You simply belong to the “good guys”, to those who are on the “right side”. One believes that one has to instruct the mistaken citizen.
It is no longer a question of neutrality, but of representing the “right cause”, and surprisingly often this coincides with the interests of the government. The sentence by Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs mentioned above has even been completely reinterpreted in the meantime, in the sense of “attitude journalism”.
But this is increasingly alienating journalists from a good part of their clientele.
In the 1990s, the red carpet was rolled out to us reporters, editors, and presenters when we showed up anywhere in the country. Today we almost have to be happy when people don’t shout “Lying press!” [Lügenpresse; a term adopted by the Nazis in the Third Reich for the Jewish, communist, and foreign press; S.R.]. Of course, this term is wrong and should be rejected because of its history, but we journalists play a large part in the increasing alienation.
To be fair, the aforementioned “attitude journalism” only applies to some of the journalists, but mostly to their prominent representatives. Many of my colleagues seem to be overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject. Not intellectually, but rather because there is no time to dig into these things alongside the daily routine work. Close to impossible if you still have to do homeschooling with the children in the evening. Others simply lack interest in the subject.
In any case, one reason is the fear of attracting negative attention through overly critical statements. The self-reinforcing momentum of the mainstream bubble ensures that hardly anyone wants to swim against the current. Although a good number of the editors are on permanent contracts, there is great concern about the consequences. As I can observe in myself.
A fundamental problem with the mainstream bubble is that it either ignores or suppresses what is outside the bubble or perceives and interprets it from within that bubble. And so most mainstream journalists know the statements and positions of critical thinkers like Wodarg and Bhakdi (to name just two of many) only from reports in the mainstream media, which are of course biased accordingly. Hardly anyone takes the trouble to actually draw from the numerous alternative sources.
AN AFTERWORD
This report is of course only a subjective assessment. Most of my fellow journalists would see it completely differently. However, I am not so concerned here with assessing the danger of the corona virus or the appropriateness of government measures. My concern is that in the corona crisis, in my opinion, journalistic standards and principles have been increasingly thrown overboard, as I have tried to at least indicate.
This in turn ensures that the media have become virtually meaningless as a democratic corrective, which in turn plays into the hands of political aspirations to power.
George Orwell is reported to have said that journalism is when you publish something that someone does not want published. Everything else is propaganda. Measured against this claim, it has to be said that the mainstream media in the corona crisis to 99 percent only deliver propaganda.
I myself have the naive hope of still being able to make a difference, in whatever way, because freedom of the press is in and of itself an extremely important asset in a democratically free society. I still believe in that.
The author of the following text has been an editor and newscaster for public broadcasting for many years and writes here under a pseudonym. He reports from the inner workings of a newsroom during the corona crisis. The article was originally published by the German online magazine Multipolar. Culture-specific explanations have been added by the translator.
Bernays and Propaganda
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog | February 6, 2021
Many years ago, the Jewish-American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated “facts” deeply insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays, who was the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was one of Lippmann’s most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann’s theories into practice. Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass manipulation of the public mind.
Bernays claimed “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind” it will be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it”. He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the ‘engineering of consent’, and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a “herd instinct”, and that if the multi-party electoral system (which was fabricated by a group of European elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites, massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, “invisible people”, would have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to “engineer” the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to him, this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of democracy. (1) (1a) (2)
Bernays wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” He stated that in America, people are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested, largely by men they have never heard of. He claimed, “This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner. In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (3)
In his main work titled ‘Propaganda’, (4) (4a) which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in which individuals were inherently dangerous (to the rapacity of the elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. He wrote further that “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any … wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by … those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. Fortunately, the … politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.” He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy to accomplish: “So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that (they produce) an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless.”
And it wasn’t only the public masses that were ‘inherently dangerous’, but a nation’s leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control. Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again: “In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.” He went on to tell us that “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.” And in this case, the “few” are the wealthy elites, their even wealthier bankers, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.
US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the US into the First World War as they wished, but was having little success with public opinion at home; few Americans wanted to enter the European war. In 1917 Wilson founded what was called The Committee on Public Information, of which Bernays became a star member. It was Bernays’ vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at “bringing democracy to all of Europe”, that proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays, American war marketing was born and would never die.
Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The “shrewd” designers of Bernays’ “invisible government” developed a standard technique for what was essentially propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect their supporters.
Bernays was apparently stunned by the outstanding success of his democracy slogan and hate campaign in swaying public opinion in favor of war, and so immediately began to apply his model to peacetime enterprises. “In applying his uncle’s Freudian theories to deal with public conceptions, Bernays realised that provoking a fear of communism and then manipulating the public’s emotions toward it, could be a sure recipe for success in the widespread engineering of popular opinion and control of the population. This theory was so powerful that it became a weapon of its own during the cold war.” The term ‘propaganda’ had acquired a poor reputation so Bernays created and promoted the term ‘Public Relations’, but of course his processes were no such thing. Bernays’ PR ethic involved psychological manipulation and control of the public mind through cleverly-devised – and thoroughly false – propaganda.
Bernays carries the blame for more than American entry into the two world wars, having been instrumental in paving the way for the US cannibalisation and military colonisation of much of the world, and for the US installing and supporting the dozens of brutal military dictatorships around the world. His first international project was helping to engineer the US overthrow of the popular elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. At the time, the Rockefellers’ United Fruit Company and various US elites and international financiers owned most of Guatemala including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most exports. When Arbenz commenced expropriations and land redistribution, Bernays developed a massive propaganda campaign that colored Arbenz as communist, a terrorist, an enemy to democracy, a blot on humanity, and much more, to the extent that American public opinion supported an outrageous travesty and one of the most brutal violations of human rights in US history. Bernays’ template has been used about 70 times with US invasions of that many nations, which is one source of the vast disconnect between what the American people believe their government has done and what it has actually done. As a side note, Guatemala appealed to the United Nations to stop the Americans’ massive interference in their country, a plea that was sympathetically received by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who proved troublesome for the US. He would do so again a few years later, and would be assassinated by the CIA for his trouble.
I discussed earlier the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of this is supported by the witch-hunting versions of Christianity that Americans have embraced, but much of the blame must be laid on Bernays’ propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world – which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn’t difficult to understand. In a discussion of a landscaping option for our garden, we could have a range of dispassionate responses from antipathy to adoration, but when Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans killing babies, the range of potential responses was not dispassionate but rather entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, with no other reasonable choices. We see this in debates on subjects like global warming, where positions do not correspond to educational or employment circumstances, nor to experience, but tend to be strongly emotional responses along ideological and political lines with precisely the kind of binary mentality Bernays predicted.
It is interesting to note that the manipulators eventually became the manipulated. Wilson, in his eagerness to manipulate public opinion in favor of war, failed to realise he was himself being manipulated by his handlers, by these same elite propagandists whose war ambitions he was fulfilling, as well as other schemes they had already planted in his mind. The puppeteer became the puppet, and the practice became permanent. The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff, the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt’s “intense desire for war” (5) (6) (7) in 1939 was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course approved of the infection of the entire American population. George Bush with Iraq and Obama with Libya and Syria are not different. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Bernays was very correct in stating that a society’s ability to participate in a democracy was dependent on how well-informed the society was, but Americans fail to appreciate that it is ignorance and not knowledge or education that protects the existence of multi-party political systems. That is why American leaders, controlled by the same “invisible government” and with a fully-compliant elite-owned media, have intentionally misrepresented their current policies and actions to the public, while their “elite few” specialised in massive historical revisionism, especially American history in the world and the effects of that history on other nations. By keeping Americans ignorant and uninformed, their minds filled with foolish and false myths, and forever distracted by irrelevancies, American leaders and their puppet-masters have used Bernays’ theories to control public opinion and beliefs with lies, religion, patriotism and emotional propaganda. It was very much an “engineered ignorance” created by a continuing program of misinformation, manipulation and deception, a shrewdly-planned subversion of the American public.
The almost overwhelming political-religious ideological fog permeating America today is due to generations of institutionalized deception and propaganda, and is the direct cause of much of the renowned ignorance of the American people. Their capitalist ideology as well, is rooted in economic misconceptions and false propaganda, with the result that almost no Americans today have any understanding of the real (and largely criminal) reasons for their nation’s economic success. The astonishing extent of the binary polarisation of politics and government is another example, yet few Americans have any understanding of their condition. As one author noted, “The wealthy in America have created an inherently imbalanced system that is exploitable by the wealthy and they are working through the use of propaganda and misinformation to convince Americans that the system is just, or, if anything, unfairly biased toward the poor.” And again, “The economic system that America has developed is dependent on the exploitation of foreign countries and the acquisition of foreign resources, which is why (the US) pursues a strategy of global preeminence.” He went on to state that the foreign policy of the American Right-Wing has been developed through extensive propaganda and exaggeration of foreign threats in order to maintain the conditions for public support and to justify the suppression of dissent.
I have written before that no Right-Wing government could survive in the full light of day with all truths exposed, because most of these truths are bitterly anti-social and designed only to create a flow of a nation’s wealth to the relatively few members of the elites and financiers. In order to function at all, a Right-Wing government like that in the US must be increasingly secretive and rely ever more heavily on Bernays and on his propaganda in order to produce in the population both his engineered consent and engineered ignorance, without which a democracy could not survive. This is so true that after World War II, the US military heavily restricted media control in occupied Germany and Japan because it recognized that the media could easily educate citizens to the dangers of the American presence both at home and in Europe. This veil of secrecy has been carried to an extent that the American and international elites have created what one writer called a massive framework of lies that functions as an arena within which the desired propaganda ideas are presented to the American people as information, but where the reality is very different from that in which American leadership functions. The same writer stated so perfectly, “Within this framework of lies the world appears to be a simplistic place of good and evil. The feeling of Americans that we are the most successful people on earth, and that America is the most successful country, is used to support the idea that America’s policies are inherently altruistic because our culture tells us that success is the measure of goodness. What is actually the case, though, is that America is successful precisely because American policy is not altruistic.”
The next essay in this series will outline in detail the beginnings – and the devastating results – of Bernays’ initial efforts.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.
CIA Counterterror Chief Suggests Going To War Against ‘Domestic Insurgents’
By Steve Watson | Summit News | February 4, 2021
The former head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center has suggested that counterinsurgency tactics used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan should be applied to ‘domestic extremists’ inside the US.
NPR reports that Robert Grenier, who directed the CIA’s Counterterrorism program from 2004 to 2006, declared “We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen.”
In an op-ed for The New York Times last week, Grenier suggested that “extremists who seek a social apocalypse … are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction.”
Grenier, also a former CIA station chief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, grouped together “the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, ‘Christian’ national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists” and claimed they are all “committed to violent extremism.”
Grenier labeled dissenters an “insurgency” and called for them to be “defeated” like an enemy army.
In further comments to NPR, Grenier stated that “as in any insurgency situation, you have committed insurgents who are typically a relatively small proportion of the affected population. But what enables them to carry forward their program is a large number of people from whom they can draw tacit support.”
Grenier also stated that insurgents may emerge from groups who “believe that the election was stolen,” or those “who don’t trust NPR or The New York Times.”
“The most violent elements that we are concerned about right now see former President Trump as a broadly popular and charismatic symbol,” the CIA spook added, before comparing Trump to Saddam Hussein.
“You know, just as I saw in the Middle East that the air went out of violent demonstrations when [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein was defeated and seen to be defeated, I think the same situation applies here,” he proclaimed.
Grenier suggested that Trump should be convicted at the upcoming impeachment trial as a ‘national security imperative’ because “So long as he is there and leading the resistance, if you will, which he shows every sign of intending to do, he is going to be an inspiration to very violent people.”
Grenier then compared Americans to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, noting that in Afghanistan “the thrust of our campaign there was, yes, to hunt down al-Qaida, but primarily to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish. And that meant fighting the Taliban.”
“I think that is the heart of what we need to deal with here,” he added.
Linking to Grenier’s comments, journalist Glenn Greenwald quipped that wedding guests throughout America should watch out for drone missiles.
If you’re planning a wedding on US soil in the next couple of years, probably best to assign one of the guests to k… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 03, 2021
The call to treat Americans as terrorist insurgents comes on the heels of a Department of Homeland Security warning that those dissatisfied with the election result may rise up and commit acts of terrorism in the coming weeks.
“Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” stated the bulletin issued last week through the DHS National Terrorist Advisory System — or NTAS.
The bulletin added that ‘extremists’ may be “motivated by a range of issues, including anger over COVID-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, and police use of force.”
The establishment wants a Reality Czar in order to crush dissent, not unite us around objective truth
By Michael McCaffrey | RT | February 3, 2021
The mainstream media and ruling elite really hate conspiracy theories and misinformation – except when they don’t.
On February 2, which ironically enough is Groundhog Day here in the US, the New York Times published an article titled ‘How The Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis’.
It seems a very bad sign that America is now relying on a geriatric Washington insider whose own perception of reality has been called in to question numerous times to solve a “reality crisis”.
One of the suggestions was that Biden should create a “Reality Czar” to oversee the dismantling of “disinformation” and the surveillance of “conspiracy theorists”.
In the article, writer Kevin Roose spoke with ‘experts’ who offered suggestions about how to unify Americans around “reality” by stamping out “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”.
That sounds like a great idea – I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
The problem with a ‘reality czar’ is that America is a post-reality nation. Our culture has gone so far to the extreme with regard to embracing subjective experience over objective reality that some blowhard bureaucrat is not going to be able to tip the scales back towards the rational.
And, of course, that is the point. The Biden administration doesn’t want to return America to objective reality, they want Americans to embrace the establishment’s reality – and those are two very different things.
The establishment reality is the neo-liberal, corporate controlled, military-industrial-complex reality that loathes being held to account for its continuous misdeeds and misinformation.
The establishment reality demands we accept the absurdly incomplete official story regarding the spate of assassinations in the ’60s (JFK, MLK, RFK) while refusing to declassify and un-redact the millions of government files on those topics it won’t let us see.
The establishment reality lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and gave us the hell of the Vietnam War.
The establishment reality lied to us about Iran-Contra and the death squads in Latin America. It also lied about its complicity in the drug trade while it manufactured a War on Drugs.
The establishment reality refused to declassify documents about 9/11 and to investigate the funding for that attack. It also unleashed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s ‘Dark Side’, which included the War on Terror, torture, massive surveillance, Gitmo, rendition and the Patriot Act.
The establishment reality was the one that told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and gave us the Iraq War, and continues to give us the war in Yemen and the carnage in Libya and across the globe.
It is often said that daylight is the best disinfectant, but we are continuously kept in the dark, and the establishment, regardless of which party is in power, is a gangrenous limb whose lies and disinformation are much more toxic to America and the world than anything some QAnon clowns can conjure in their fever dreams.
It is pretty rich that the New York Times is running this article calling for a reality czar and bemoaning disinformation, as it has long aided and abetted the establishment in its concealing of truth and distorting of objective reality.
Whether it be Walter Duranty and his lies for Stalin, or Judith Miller and her lies for Bush, the Times has proven over and over again that it isn’t a news organisation, but a praetorian guard meant to protect the tyrants, oligarchs and aristocrats from the masses.
Am I the only one who remembers the Russiagate hysteria? Stories of dastardly Rooskies hacking into power grids and voting booths, and using microwave weapons to attack Americans have been commonplace in the Times and across the mainstream media, and yet those ‘conspiracy theories’ were not only accepted but embraced. The establishment’s hatred of conspiracy theories is particularly amusing in light of what transpired over the past four years.
Would the new Reality Czar hold the Times accountable for those idiotic stories? Would MSNBC be chastised for Rachel Maddow’s conspiratorial ramblings? Would CNN be reprimanded for its “mostly peaceful protests” disinformation?
Would the Reality Czar target the scientists and medical experts who publicly proclaimed that it was OK to gather in large groups during the pandemic to protest for Black Lives Matter but not to protest against lockdown?
How about those radical trans activists who distort and contort both science and reality?
Would the Reality Czar target the new White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, especially considering her laughably ridiculous press conference from 2015, at which, with a straight face, she stated that the US had a “long-standing” policy against backing coups?
Of course not.
Like a paranoid schizophrenic, our political and media elite is constantly trying to convince people that its own devious delusions are the one true reality.
The Reality Czar would not be required to actually quash misinformation and conspiracy theories – only the misinformation and conspiracy theories the establishment doesn’t like.
As Orwell told us, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.” The establishment wants to control the present, the past, the future and, most of all, you. And a Reality Czar is just the beginning.
The ‘reality is that the ruling elite are pushing the notion of rampant right-wing domestic terrorists and the danger of conspiracy theories in an attempt to conceal their crimes and stifle dissent, not to help objective “reality” flourish.
Claims of Silicon Valley bias are ‘disinformation’, say researchers citing disgraced partisan ‘experts’ and Big Tech itself
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 2, 2021
Silicon Valley wants you to know that even thinking they might be biased against conservatives is ‘disinformation,’ and cite a paper informed by censorious busybodies, partisan hacks and their own executives to prove it.
Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio approvingly quoted the Washington Post story about a report arguing that the “claim of anti-conservative animus on the part of social media companies is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.”
Nothing to see here, folks, just a former press secretary for Democrat Kamala Harris (it’s in his bio) retweeting a newspaper that openly endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket saying that Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong, right?
Before the “fact checkers” declare that actually, Pacilio was a spokesman for Harris in 2011-2014, when she was California’s attorney general – the point is that he doesn’t bother hiding his political allegiance, and neither does the Post. But it would be wrong to judge a report solely by the people who endorse it, so let’s take a look at it, shall we?
Authored by Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University (NYU) and research fellow J. Grant Sims, the 28-page paper is a regurgitation of talking points by mainstream media, “disinformation researchers” advocating for censorship under the guise of ‘Russiagate,’ and Big Tech companies themselves. Looking at their 74 endnotes, one finds multiple mentions of mainstream media outlets, but also citations of the Democrat propaganda shop Media Matters, the German Marshall Fund, and even the Biden-Harris campaign.
Any study of social media censorship that doesn’t address the New York Post getting locked out by Twitter and suppressed by Facebook over the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election is a farce. This report mentions it exactly once – in a “conservatives pounce” way, no less.
Describing the NY Post story as “questionable” and “apparently based on stolen emails,” the researchers claim it was a case of “reasonable decisions wrapped in mystifying processes.” Their conclusion mirrors the (footnoted) Washington Post editorial, literally headlined “Twitter and Facebook were right to suppress a Biden smear. But they should tell us why they did.” No bias here, everyone!
In other words, they literally want increased censorship on social media platforms, justified by the conservatives supposedly “falsely” claiming they’re being censored.
To no one’s surprise, the researchers conclude that platforms need a “content overseer” executive who would report directly to the top, and “do a better job of protecting users and society at large from harmful content.” They also want the Biden administration to either set up a new agency for digital oversight or give more power to existing ones, and reform Section 230 – the legal shield protecting platforms from lawsuits over content – to make it conditional on their censorship, or as they put it, “acceptance of a range of new responsibilities related to policing content.”
Now comes the best part. Among the people the authors thanked for their “time and insight” are representatives of Google, Twitter, and Facebook; two people from NewsGuard, a few Big Tech apologists from the neoliberal and neoconservative circles, a former Obama White House tech policy advisor – identified here by his new gig at Harvard Kennedy School – and Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
DiResta has made herself quite a career at Stanford, producing alarmist reports of what Russia “might” do to harm American democracy or something, but she started out as research director at a shop called New Knowledge. This group of “tech specialists who lean Democratic,” to use a New York Times understatement, was literally caught running a false flag “Russian bot” operation on Twitter in 2017, during the US Senate special election in Alabama, in order to elect a Democrat.
Her inclusion is just the cherry on top of the giant hypocrisy cake that is the Barrett-Sims paper. It’s worse than merely factually wrong: it’s an exercise in gaslighting, projection and breath-taking dishonesty, it relies on self-serving and dishonest sources, and literally advocates for censorship. Whatever it takes to protect Our Democracy from “disinformation,” I guess.
Once the story of that broke – in December 2018, too late to change anything – New Knowledge quietly rebranded as Yonder, and that was it. No accountability. Instead of being disqualified as partisan hacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee doubled down on “insights” from New Knowledge/Yonder to insist there was “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election. DiResta simply moved to Stanford and kept doing the same thing.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Fake News Over What’s Fit to Print a NYT Specialty
By Stephen Lendman | February 2, 2021
Like other establishment media, the NYT operates as a mouthpiece for wealth, power and privilege.
It long ago abandoned news fit to print, state-approved propaganda featured instead.
Relying on its reports for news, information and analysis assures mind manipulation over truth and full disclosure on major issues of the day.
The self-styled newspaper of record is consistently on the wrong side of cutting-edge ones relating to the health, welfare, and rights of ordinary Americans and others abroad.
Instead of denouncing US imperial wars on invented enemies, it cheerleads them.
Instead of opposing hazardous to health covid vaccines, it supports mass-vaxxing in flagrant violation of the Nuremberg Code.
Instead of advocating for peace, equity, justice and the rule of law, it long ago abandoned these principles.
In its latest edition, the Times reinvented what happened in the run-up to last November’s US presidential election and its aftermath.
It continued to suppress indisputable evidence of election fraud in a fake news piece titled: “Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election (sic).”
What happened last November was a selection, not an election, for the nation’s highest office.
Trump won. Biden lost. He’s now America’s 46th president, his predecessor a private citizen again.
The will of US dark forces triumphed over popular sentiment, rendering Biden/Harris illegitimate.
To its disgrace, the Times pretends otherwise.
A litany of bald-faced Big Lies defined its election reporting.
In its latest edition, it defied reality once again by falsely claiming the following:
“There was no substantial evidence of election fraud (sic), and there were nowhere near enough ‘irregularities’ to reverse the outcome in the courts (sic).”
“Mr. Trump did not, could not, win the election, not by ‘a lot’ or even a little (sic).”
“Allegations of (Dem) malfeasance had disintegrated in embarrassing fashion (sic).”
No “suitcase(s) of illegal ballots” were found (sic).”
“Dead voters… turn(ed) up alive (sic).”
No evidence showed “Dominion Systems voting machines had transformed thousands of Trump votes into Biden votes (sic).”
All of the above are bald-faced Big Lies, further proof that the self-styled newspaper of record is a lying machine, that nothing it reports on major issues can be taken at face value.
It called legitimate efforts to expose brazen election fraud by Trump’s legal team “an extralegal campaign to subvert the election (sic), rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable (sic).”
No “deadly” assault on Capitol Hill occurred.
It was stormed by anti-Trump hooligans, bussed in for the orchestrated anti-DJT false flag — falsely blamed on him and his supporters who had nothing to do with what happened.
The Times reinvented reality with its fake news claims.
Throughout Trump’s tenure, it consistently bashed him for the wrong reasons, ignoring his real wrongdoing because the vast majority in Washington share guilt.
Trump’s upcoming Senate trial next week for inciting insurrection lacks legitimacy.
With the vast majority of Republicans opposing the phony charge, acquittal is virtually certain.
A two-thirds Senate super-majority required to convict is nowhere in sight.
Substituting fiction for fact, the Times said the following:
Pre-and-post-Election 2020, “forces of disorder were… directed by (Trump) in one final norm-defying act of… reality-denying (sic).”
His legal team “skated the lines of legal ethics and reason (sic).”
Daily “the lie grew (sic), finally managing to… upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy (sic).”
What the Times calls “democracy,” is government of, by, and for privileged interests exclusively at the expense of most others.
It’s been the American way from inception that includes numerous past instances of federal, state and local election fraud since at least the early 19th century.
Throughout his tenure, Trump was wrong time and again on domestic and geopolitical issues.
On brazen Election 2020 fraud, he’s right. Indisputable evidence backs him.
Anti-Trump dark forces manipulated results in key battleground states to hand Biden/Harris the election DJT legitimately won.
Elected to a second term, he’s out, Dems in the old-fashioned way — by brazen election fraud carrying the day.
Claims by the Times otherwise blackens its tattered reputation more than already.
Its overly-lengthy piece was long on fake news propaganda — bereft of journalism the way it should be, what’s absent in virtually all its reports on major issues, rubbish featured instead.
The bottom line is that now-private citizen Trump was denied reelection by brazen fraud.
Fake news claims otherwise by the Times and other establishment media represent some of the worst fourth estate rubbish in memory.
Their Election 2020 reports read like bad fiction, reality airbrushed out in support of loser Biden over winner Trump.
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Former Insiders Criticize Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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