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UKRAINE: The Syria Playbook Redux

Yes, the playbook for Syria is now being used for Ukraine. But is it Russia’s or America’s?

By Peter Ford | 21st Century Wire | March 21, 2022

The Russians in attacking Ukraine are taking leaves out of their Syrian playbook, so we are being constantly told. But the American origin of this term gives us a clue as to what is really going on.

The chemical weapons play

One of the plays being used is apparently the brandishing of chemical weapons. It’s important to recall what actually happened in Syria in this regard.

The first alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria occurred in the Ghouta suburbs of Damascus in 2013. After a vote in the British Parliament scuppered a Western plan to bomb Syria in retaliation, the Russians, not the West, took active steps to remove Syria’s stocks of chemical weapons, shepherding Syria through a process of dismantling all its stocks under international supervision and verification (compare and contrast US research collaboration with Ukraine in biolabs so sensitive that records had to be destroyed before the Russians arrived).

Claims nevertheless continued to be made, never verified in situ by independent parties, that Syria was using chemical weapons.

In April 2018 reports emerged from Douma on the outskirts of Damascus that Syria had used chlorine gas in a particularly egregious attack on civilians. Without waiting even the 48 hours needed for international inspectors to arrive, the US, UK and France launched punitive bombing raids on Syria. Subsequently, inspectors found evidence at the scene consistent with a false flag operation. That evidence was doctored at headquarters in The Hague under intense pressure from the US and UK. The real lesson from the incident – that fraudsters were at work – was thus never learned and a spurious version of the truth prevailed.

What really happened, many experts believe, was that jihadi groups affiliated with Al Qaida yet supported by Western powers fabricated the incident (it wasn’t difficult with Western intelligence agencies and gullible Western media eager to pin blame on Assad) in order to provide a pretext for the West to enter the war and turn back the tide against Assad.

These are but two among other similar incidences talking place over the course of the conflict. 

Rewriting history

Scroll forward four years. Russia, we are being repeatedly told, is preparing to use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine while pre-emptively covering itself by predicting use of a false flag.

In Syria, Assad was winning and had no need to use chemical weapons. It would have been crazy to do so, when it was the only thing that could make the West bomb him. In Ukraine, Putin similarly has no need to do the one thing which would likely lead to direct NATO intervention. No matter, the authorised version of the history of the Syrian conflict holds that abetted by Russia, Syria used chemical weapons, and so today Russia must be poised to do the same in Ukraine.

‘History is written by the victors’, Churchill is supposed to have said. With Syria, given the West’s control of the narrative via its monopoly hold over international media, history is written by the losers.

Constant parallels are being drawn with Syria in the Ukraine context. But they are the wrong parallels, and the wrong lessons are being drawn from the Syrian ordeal.

The Russian version of the playbook, according to the West

According to the Western narrative, enunciated by officials and echoed by reporters who seem to see it as their job to act like government press officers or cheerleaders, the Russian playbook in Syria is now being applied wholesale to Ukraine. Its chapters comprise of indiscriminate shelling, carpet bombing of cities, targeting of civilians in their homes, hospitals, schools and shelters, sieges of major towns, prevention of civilians from leaving through humanitarian corridors, commission of many other brutal war crimes, and using false flag accusations.

This indeed is how the Western media portrayed the Syrian conflict and are now doing the same for Ukrainian conflict. But the picture presented distorts some key facts and obscures others.

Airbrushing

It almost totally airbrushes out the jihadist opposition to Assad, just as the Ukrainian Nazis are being airbrushed out of the picture in Ukraine. The Syrian jihadists used human shields as a consistent strategy. ‘Collateral damage’, an Americanism we learnt to use in America’s war on Vietnam, becomes inevitable under such circumstances. Countless civilians died as US-led forces levelled most of Raqqa before driving ISIS out of it. Dead bodies were still being retrieved from the rubble of Raqqa two years later. Is this the playbook we are talking about here, the one the Coalition used against ISIS?

The same techniques of using human shields deployed  by jihadists are now being used in Ukraine. How many people are aware that Mariupol, where this is happening most, is where the extreme nationalist Azov brigade have barracks, and that they have reportedly been firing from civilian buildings and preventing civilians from leaving?

Similarly, who knew that jihadists in East Aleppo were constantly shelling civilian areas in government-held Western Aleppo? Or that the amount of destruction in Aleppo was nothing like what was is being assumed, or that the ‘genocide’ (that other overworked term) of a quarter of a million foretold by the professional hysterics of the UN for East Aleppo turned into the bussing out of a few thousand fighters, who surrendered and were taken with their families to other jihadi-controlled areas?

If anything, the lesson from Syria was that the Russians sometimes showed more restraint than their hosts. Russia forced the Syrian government, eager to recover East Aleppo, to delay operations while abortive parleys took place and the jihadists won more time to entrench their positions. Russia also forced the Syrian government to accept indulgent terms for the surrender of jihadists in the South, allowing fighters to keep small arms and creating no-go areas for government forces. Those familiar with these facts will not be surprised to learn that according to the UN civilian deaths in Ukraine so far are numbered in hundreds rather than the many thousands claimed by propagandists.

The Western playbook

None of this is to condone all Russian actions, but in order to avoid repeating in Ukraine the mistakes the West made in Syria – it is important to see things as they really are. And in the Western playbook there were many mistakes.

The worst was to supply jihadist groups with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms and equipment, which only served to inflame the situation, abet terrorism and prolong Syria’s agony. How much of the arms now being funnelled into Ukraine will end up in the Nazi battalions and later in the Middle East? Will the arms really hasten the end of violence or prolong it?

A second leaf from the Western playbook for Syria now being used in spades a propos of Ukraine is sanctions. Cruel, far-reaching sanctions in Syria have totally failed in their stated aim of ‘changing Assad’s behaviour’ (our wicked adversaries have ‘behaviour’, our virtuous selves have ‘policies’) while immiserating the Syrian people. Sanctions on Russia are plainly doing more harm to the world economy than they are to Russia, and cannot possibly change Russia’s ‘behaviour’ in the short term. And is ‘crippling Russia’, with its echoes of German reparations post World War I, anyway really such a great idea?

That other favourite staple of the US playbook, regime change, as attempted with Syria – after stellar accomplishments  in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, was precisely what brought about today’s crisis in Ukraine, for it was the US-backed removal of an elected President of Ukraine in 2014 which precipitated the chain of events leading to the present conflict.

The Western playbook provides that foreign leaders who refuse to bend the knee should always be portrayed as crazed and brutal. They always need arraigning before an International Criminal Court, the jurisdiction of which the US denies for itself, to the extent of sanctioning a prosecutor who dares to pursue a US client state. This personalisation and demonisation obviates any risk that policy makers might have to face up to the reality that other countries have legitimate concerns too. In the court of Western public opinion the Great Powers have ensured a hanging jury for Assad, and now Putin.

The page in the US playbook to which administrations are most attached, however, the gift which keeps on giving, is the accusation against target nations that they are using or planning to use chemical weapons. Has the world forgotten the non-existent Iraqi WMD? The watertight intelligence? The 45 minutes for rockets to reach British bases in Cyprus? How the US can have recourse to a similar ploy today, claiming Russia is planning something nefarious, without being hooted at in derision is merely testimony to the extent to which mainstream media has prostrated itself before power. The most far-fetched claims can be made without a shred of media scrutiny.

That US Secretary of State Antony Blinken could repeatedly make the ‘chemical weapons’ claim is deeply disturbing.

If this is not the US laying the groundwork for a false flag incident involving chemical weapons, or perhaps the bioweapons the US is accused of developing in Ukraine, it certainly looks like it.

If that is the case it is no longer playbooks we may be dealing with, it’s the Book of Lamentations.

***

Author Peter Ford is a global affairs analyst, and the former British Ambassador to Syria (2003-2006) and Bahrain (1999-2002).

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Twitter blocks account of Russia’s UN diplomat over Mariupol post

TASS | March 18, 2022

The administration of Twitter has blocked the account of Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky over the post in which he denied allegations about Russia’s role in a strike on a maternity clinic in Mariupol.

“This morning, Twitter blocked my account, demanding to delete the tweet of March 9, in which I informed that two days before that, we warned at a Security Council meeting that the maternity home that Russia had allegedly made a strike at, causing casualties, had been long before turned into a firing position by Ukrainian nationalists,” the diplomat said. “We said on March 7 that all medics and patients had to leave the hospital. With a glance to this, allegations about casualties look like another fake news. This is what I wrote, expressing regrets that the UN was taking part in circulating it,” the diplomat said.

“I see this as an illustration of how much the West is really interested in freedom of speech and is ready to hear alternative points of view,” the diplomat wrote. “The number of users of my English-language Twitter reached 22,000 in recent days, it was often quoted by Western media, the published information was instantly spread among journalists accredited to the UN,” he wrote.

Polyansky stressed that he had always tried to respond to journalists and ordinary users who were interested in Russia’s position. The diplomat said that he would shortly open an English-language channel on Telegram and would use it regardless of whether Twitter would reopen access to his account or not.

March 20, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Ofcom Revokes Licence Of News Channel RT

By Richie Allen | March 18, 2022

Ofcom has revoked the licence of Russian state News channel RT, saying that the channel was not “fit and proper to hold a UK broadcast licence.”

According to The BBC:

RT’s coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been under investigation by Ofcom, and the channel had already disappeared from UK screens.

RT called Ofcom “a tool of the government”.

The channel became unavailable on all UK broadcast platforms earlier this month as a result of a ban imposed by the European Union.

Although the UK is no longer in the EU, the bloc applied sanctions to satellite companies in Luxembourg and France, which provided the RT feed to Sky, Freesat and Freeview in the UK.

UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who has described the channel as “Putin’s polluting propaganda machine”, said at the time she hoped it would not return to UK screens.

In recent weeks, Ofcom has launched 29 investigations into the “due impartiality of RT’s news and current affairs coverage” of the invasion of Ukraine.

RT deputy editor-in-chief Anna Belkina said Ofcom had “robbed the UK public of access to information”.

“What we have witnessed over the last few days, be it comments from the President of the EU Commission or from PM Boris Johnson, is that none of them had pointed to a single grain of evidence that what RT has reported over these days, and continues to report, is not true.

“Instead, what they have said is that what RT brings to its audience is not allowed in their supposedly free media environment. When it comes to the Russian voice, or just a different perspective from theirs, it is simply not allowed to exist.”

I’ve been watching RT closely since Russia invaded Ukraine. Over the course of the last few weeks, the TV channel and its website has published claims made against the Russian government by NATO countries, right alongside the Kremlin narrative.

In fact, I’ve been astonished at how balanced the content has been. The same cannot be said for the BBC or SKY News.

It’s a sickening blow for free speech, but it’s only the beginning.

March 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop — Falsely Called “Russian Disinformation” — is Authentic

By Glenn Greenwald | March 17, 2022

One of the most successful disinformation campaigns in modern American electoral history occurred in the weeks prior to the 2020 presidential election. On October 14, 2020 — less than three weeks before Americans were set to vote — the nation’s oldest newspaper, The New York Post, began publishing a series of reports about the business dealings of the Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in countries in which Biden, as Vice President, wielded considerable influence (including Ukraine and China) and would again if elected president.

The backlash against this reporting was immediate and intense, leading to suppression of the story by U.S. corporate media outlets and censorship of the story by leading Silicon Valley monopolies. The disinformation campaign against this reporting was led by the CIA’s all-but-official spokesperson Natasha Bertrand (then of Politico, now with CNN), whose article on October 19 appeared under this headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”

These “former intel officials” did not actually say that the “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo.” Indeed, they stressed in their letter the opposite: namely, that they had no evidence to suggest the emails were falsified or that Russia had anything to do them, but, instead, they had merely intuited this “suspicion” based on their experience:

We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.

But a media that was overwhelmingly desperate to ensure Trump’s defeat had no time for facts or annoying details such as what these former officials actually said or whether it was in fact true. They had an election to manipulate. As a result, that these emails were “Russian disinformation” — meaning that they were fake and that Russia manufactured them — became an article of faith among the U.S.’s validly despised class of media employees.

Very few even included the crucial caveat that the intelligence officials themselves stressed: namely, that they had no evidence at all to corroborate this claim. Instead, as I noted last September, “virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.” The Huffington Post even published a must-be-seen-to-be-believed campaign ad for Joe Biden, masquerading as “reporting,” that spread this lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation.”

This disinformation campaign about the Biden emails was then used by Big Tech to justify brute censorship of any reporting on or discussion of this story: easily the most severe case of pre-election censorship in modern American political history. Twitter locked The New York Post‘s Twitter account for close to two weeks due to its refusal to obey Twitter’s orders to delete any reference to its reporting. The social media site also blocked any and all references to the reporting by all users; Twitter users were barred even from linking to the story in private chats with one another. Facebook, through its spokesman, the life-long DNC operative Andy Stone, announced that they would algorithmically suppress discussion of the reporting to ensure it did not spread, pending a “fact check[] by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners” which, needless to say, never came — precisely because the archive was indisputably authentic.

The archive’s authenticity, as I documented in a video report from September, was clear from the start. Indeed, as I described in that report, I staked my career on its authenticity when I demanded that The Intercept publish my analysis of these revelations, and then resigned when its vehemently anti-Trump editors censored any discussion of those emails precisely because it was indisputable that the archive was authentic (The Intercept‘s former New York Times reporter James Risen was given the green light by these same editors to spread and endorse the CIA’s lie, as he insisted that the laptop should be ignored because “a group of former intelligence officials issued a letter saying that the Giuliani laptop story has the classic trademarks of Russian disinformation.”) I knew the archive was real because all the relevant journalistic metrics that one evaluates to verify large archives of this type — including the Snowden archive and the Brazil archive which I used to report a series of investigative exposés — left no doubt that it was genuine (that includes documented verification from third parties who were included in the email chains and who showed that the emails they had in their possession matched the ones in the archive word-for-word).

Any residual doubts that the Biden archive was genuine — and there should have been none — were shattered when a reporter from Politico, Ben Schreckinger, published a book last September, entitled “The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty-Year Rise to Power,” in which his new reporting proved that the key emails on which The New York Post relied were entirely authentic. Among other things, Schreckinger interviewed several people included in the email chains who provided confirmation that the emails in their possession matched the ones in the Post‘s archive word for word. He also obtained documents from the Swedish government that were identical to key documents in the archive. His own outlet, Politico, was one of the few to even acknowledge his book. While ignoring the fact that they were the first to spread the lie that the emails were “Russian disinformation,” Politico editors — under the headline “Double Trouble for Biden”— admitted that the book “finds evidence that some of the purported Hunter Biden laptop material is genuine, including two emails at the center of last October’s controversy.”

The vital revelations in Schreckinger’s book were almost completely ignored by the very same corporate media outlets that published the CIA’s now-debunked lies. They just pretended it never happened. Grappling with it would have forced them to acknowledge a fact quite devastating to whatever remaining credibility they have: namely, that they all ratified and spread a coordinated disinformation campaign in order to elect Joe Biden and defeat Donald Trump. With strength in numbers, and knowing that they speak only to and for liberals who are happy if they lie to help Democrats, they all joined hands in an implicit vow of silence and simply ignored the new proof in Schreckinger’s book that, in the days leading up to the 2020 election, they all endorsed a disinformation campaign.

It will now be much harder to avoid confronting the reality of what they did, though it is highly likely that they will continue to do so. This morning, The New York Times published an article about the broad, ongoing FBI criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s international business and tax activities. Prior to the election, the Times, to their credit, was one of the few to apply skepticism to the CIA’s pre-election lie, noting on October 22 that “no concrete evidence has emerged that the laptop contains Russian disinformation.” Because the activities of Hunter Biden now under FBI investigation directly pertain to the emails first revealed by The Post, the reporters needed to rely upon the laptop’s archive to amplify and inform their reporting. That, in turn, required The New York Times to verify the authenticity of this laptop and its origins — exactly what, according to their reporters, they successfully did:

People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.

That this cache of emails was authentic was clear from the start. Any doubts were obliterated by publication of Schreckinger’s book six months ago. Now the Paper of Record itself explicitly states not only that the emails “were authenticated” but also that the original story from The Post about how they obtained these materials — they “come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop” — “appears” to be true.

What this means is that, in the crucial days leading up to the 2020 presidential election, most of the corporate media spread an absolute lie about The New York Post‘s reporting in order to mislead and manipulate the American electorate. It means that Big Tech monopolies, along with Twitter, censored this story based on a lie from “the intelligence community.” It means that Facebook’s promise from its DNC operative that it would suppress discussion of the reporting in order to conduct a “fact-check” of these documents was a fraud because, if one had been conducted, that no fact-check was even published because, if an honest one had been conducted, it would have proven that Facebook’s censorship decree was based on a lie. It means that millions of Americans were denied the ability to hear about reporting on the candidate leading all polls to become the next president, and instead were subjected to a barrage of lies about the provenance (Russia did it ) and authenticity (disinformation! ) of these documents.

The objections to noting all of this today are drearily predictable. Reporting on Hunter Biden is irrelevant since he was not himself a candidate (what made the reporting relevant was what it revealed about the involvement of Joe Biden in these deals). Given the war in Ukraine, now is not the time to discuss all of this (despite the fact that they are usually ignored, there are always horrific wars being waged even if the victims are not as sympathetic as European Ukrainians and the perpetrators are the film’s Good Guys and not the Bad Guys). The real reason most liberals and their media allies do not want to hear about any of this is because they believe that the means they used (deliberately lying to the public with CIA disinformation) are justified by their noble ends (defeating Trump).

Whatever else is true, both the CIA/media disinformation campaign in the weeks before the 2020 election and the resulting regime of brute censorship imposed by Big Tech are of historic significance. Democrats and their new allies in the establishment wing of the Republican Party may be more excited by war in Ukraine than the subversion of their own election by the unholy trinity of the intelligence community, the corporate press, and Big Tech. But today’s admission by The New York Times that this archive and the emails in them were real all along proves that a gigantic fraud was perpetrated by the country’s most powerful institutions. What matters far more than the interest level of various partisan factions is the core truths about U.S. democracy revealed by this tawdry spectacle.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How America will Profit from War in Europe

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – NEO – 16.03.2022

When the US President Joe Biden announced, on March 8, his decision to ban imports of Russian oil and gas to the US, he opened up a potential business opportunity for the US LNG gas business to expand further into Europe and beyond. While Biden’s decision does not automatically apply to Europe, given how Europe is mindlessly following the US in its footsteps at the expense of its own strategic autonomy, there was/is no denying that most European nations will follow suit the US decision. Indeed, this was Biden’s intention when he said that this decision was made in “close consultation with our Allies and our partners around the world, particularly in Europe … to keep all NATO and all of the EU and our allies totally united.” But this is not just about unity; it is about business, making money and keeping Europe under exclusive US control.

For quite a long time, the US has been making efforts to prevent Europe from asserting too much autonomy in the international arena as a player in itself. Europe decided to refuse to follow the US decision to scrap the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. Until recently, it had differences with the US over NATO, with the French President Macron even calling the organisation “brain dead.”

But things are fast changing to the US advantage. By deliberately pushing for NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and by denying Russia any reasonable security guarantees, the US set the stage for the present crisis, which has now not only ‘united’ the EU under the US leadership, but many NATO members – in particular, Germany – have decided to increase their defense budget by at least 100 billion Euros.

What the US President Trump was unable to do through table-talks, the Biden administration has achieved through generating an actual war/ crisis in Eastern Europe. Other than NATO members, non-NATO members like Sweden, too, have decided to increase their budget, with public opinion in Sweden swinging for the fits time in favour of NATO membership in the wake of the on-going crisis. Where will this defense spending go?

There is no denying that no European county will be buying weapon systems from Russia or China, but mainly from the US military industrial complex. (NATO does not have its own force; “NATO forces” refer to multinational forces from NATO member countries, who in turn contribute both personnel and equipment to the organisation for “collective defense.”) A highly expected sale will involve F-35 fighter jets. It is, therefore, not surprising to see two major US military industrial groups, Lockheed and Raytheon, have seen their market shares rising up by 16 per cent and 3 per cent since the start of the war in Ukraine, respectively.

Apart from this massive increase in defense production, a clear indication of war in Europe being a business opportunity for the US is the field of energy export to Europe. The US decision to impose a ban on energy exports from Russia is symbolic insofar as the US is not a large buyer of Russian oil and gas. The imposition of the ban is, however, aimed at luring European markets to the US. The US, in short, is eyeing capturing the European market on a long-term basis.

As it stands, US LNG exporters are already appearing to be the big winners as gas prices in Europe hit all-time high. Major US exporters like Cheniere Energy Inc are among the top beneficiaries, as they have been able to sign long-term delas to sell LNG to Europe in very recent months. The present crisis has only made their task a lot easier and much more profitable at the same time.

This is happening at a time when the US LNG exports are expected to reach 11.4 billion cubic feet per day in 2022, accounting roughly for 22 per cent of the expected global LNG demands next year. The number of cargos of LNG shipped from the US to Europe, only in the first two months of 2022, has reached a record high of 164, as compared to the previous record of 125 in 2020. This trend is likely to continue – and even intensify – amidst European nations’ claims to reduce their dependence on Russian natural gas.

Supplying the US LNG to Europe is also part of a US plan-in-the-making to globalise its exports. As a recent report in the Washington-based think-tank, Centre for Strategic and International Studies – which receives funding from the US government – the US export of LNG to Europe for the next 20 years could provide the foundation for the export of US LNG to Asia, which is the largest market for LNG. Expansion of US LNG gas supply lines to Asia would also mean a direct territorial expansion of the US global influence.

The New York Times’ advocacy of a yet another “trans-Atlantic Pact” between the US and Europe reflects essentially how the path for increasing Europe’s dependency on the US is being laid. The EU/NATO already largely depends on the US for its security, which is one reason why there was, until recently, a growing demand from within Europe to enhance its own strategic autonomy by developing weapons systems “independently of the US.”

These initiatives are unlikely to develop any time soon, and even if they do develop, they will have no impact on Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy. It will only add to the US-led trans-Atlantic alliance.

It is important to understand that until very recently, Europe was seeking autonomy from the US, not from Russia. By manufacturing a crisis in Europe and by forcing the European nations to confront a war in their own continent, the US has been able to bring a sea-change in the European political discourse from seeking autonomy from Washington to reducing ‘dependence’ on Russia. From the US perspective, therefore, the war is already a major strategic victory – a victory that the European elite is either completely unaware of, or has been forced to shut its eyes to.

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Russian Kids Being Bullied and Abused Over Their Nationality

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | March 16, 2022

Human Rights Organization Save the Children reports that Russian children in Danish schools are being bullied and abused because of their nationality.

After being approached by multiple parents complaining about their kids facing harassment merely for being Russian, Save the Children has embarked on an effort to approach schools and institutions in a bid to raise awareness about the issue.

“We can see that it is a big problem. They are afraid of being dropped off at school in the morning and claim to have a stomach ache,” senior adviser at Save the Children Jon Kristian Lange told Danish broadcaster TV2.

The situation bears hallmarks of the early days of the COVID pandemic, when Asian people faced similar abuse, although in that instance the media reported on it, whereas the press is largely silent or even complicit in the current wave of Russophobia.

According to Lola Møldrup Hansen, a teacher at Bankagerskolen in the town of Horsens, Russian kids are being mobbed, taunted and branded ‘Russian spies.’

Supervisor Vibeke Stensgaard said the hate was creating a negative environment for young children who feel they are under threat.

Lange also highlighted the new trend of online abuse targeting Russians.

“One of the things that needs to be focused on is this strange ridicule online of being Russian, such as dancing ugly like a Russian or memes where people look evil like a Russian,” he said.

As we highlighted earlier, deranged but prominent voices in Ukraine are now brazenly calling for the genocide of Russian children.

The legacy media and cultural institutions are entirely responsible for the wave of Russophobia that has swept the world since the start of the war in Ukraine.

[The vitriol has been stoked partly by public officials, such as US Representative Eric Swalwell (D-California), who suggested that all Russian students attending American colleges should be expelled from the country.]

Ordinary Russians who have absolutely nothing to do with the Putin government are being roundly demonized by the very same entities that constantly virtue signal about the need to not blame entire races or religions for the actions of a relative few. Unless those people are white Europeans of course, then it’s open season.

March 16, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Firefox removes Yandex search, will auto-switch affected users to Google

By Rick Findlay | Reclaim The Net | March 15, 2022

Mozilla has pushed a new release of its Firefox browser with one notable change; it will no longer have Yandex, the Russian search engine, and Mail.ru as options.

“Yandex and Mail.ru have been removed as optional search providers in the drop-down search menu in Firefox,” Mozilla said.

“If you previously installed a customized version of Firefox with Yandex or Mail.ru, offered through partner distribution channels, this release removes those customizations, including add-ons and default bookmarks. Where applicable, your browser will revert to default settings, as offered by Mozilla.

“All other releases of Firefox remain unaffected by the change.”

Users affected by the changes will have their search engine automatically switched to the Google default – by which Google allegedly pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege.

“After careful consideration, we are suspending the use of Yandex Search in Firefox due to credible reports of search results displaying a prevalence of state-sponsored content, which is contrary to the principles of Mozilla,” a Mozilla spokesperson said.

“This means for the time being Yandex Search will not be the default search experience (or a default search option) for users in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. In the meantime, we are pointing people to Google.com.”

March 15, 2022 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

RT America’s Demise is a Loss for Free Speech and Diversity of Information

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | March 12, 2022

The United States government is busy banning and sanctioning virtually all things Russian. Meanwhile, big money media and social media are nearly uniformly proclaiming anti-Russia sentiment and working hard to limit Americans’ exposure of contrary information.

In this context, it is little surprise that last week RT America, with its connection to the government of Russia, ceased broadcasting. The silencing of the news organization arises from a Russia scare relentlessly fueled in America and several other countries in recent years that reached its highest manic level in the last few weeks.

The departure of RT America from television is a loss for free speech and diversity of information. And that loss comes within a larger scary progression in America — continual increasing of the muting of voices challenging narratives, such as the coronavirus scare of the last two years and the ascendant Russia scare, that are used to expand government power.

RT America has been a go-to place for news and commentary different from what is found at cable television stations such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. Flipping the channel to RT, one would likely find a different topic being discussed than at those other stations, or the same topic being discussed but with the inclusion of different perspectives or additional important information. RT America thus helped Americans become more knowledgeable about what was happening in the world and helped them overcome tunnel vision approaches often presented elsewhere.

A big step in the suppression of RT America came in 2017 when the United States government required it to register as a foreign agent with the US Department of Justice. Writing then at Consortium News, investigative reporter Robert Parry explained the apparent chilling motive of silencing alternative views and controlling information that was behind imposing this requirement:

The U.S. government’s real beef with RT seems to be that it allows on air some Americans who have been blacklisted from the mainstream media – including highly credentialed former U.S. intelligence analysts and well-informed American journalists – because they have challenged various Official Narratives.

In other words, Americans are not supposed to hear the other side of the story on important international conflicts, such as the proxy war in Syria or the civil war in Ukraine or Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. Only the State Department’s versions of those events are permitted even when those versions are themselves propagandistic if not outright false.

Five years later, the hammer came down with full force on RT America.

Goodbye, RT America. Americans will be worse off without you.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

White House briefs top social media influencers on Ukraine – reports

RT | March 12, 2022

White House officials have held a special briefing on the conflict in Ukraine for some 30 social media creators, the US media have reported, adding that the Biden administration is increasingly exploring new means of communication to get its message across to younger audiences.

The briefing was held on Thursday by the White House National Security Council special adviser for communications, Matt Miller, and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. The officials explained the US “strategic goals in the region” and answered questions about US aid to Ukraine, about NATO and Washington’s potential reaction to a Russian nuclear strike, addressing the social media creators on a zoom call, The Washington Post has reported on Friday.

The list of those invited to the briefing included people creating “explanatory” content on the conflict on TikTok, YouTube and Twitter. According to the Post, the first to break the story, the Biden administration has cooperated with Gen Z For Change – a nonprofit group – to identify content creators for the briefing.

One of those invited was Aaron Parnas, the 22-year-old son of Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-born American businessman and a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York mayor and lawyer of then-President Donald Trump. Lev Parnas was convicted in October on campaign finance charges and pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

“We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, explained, adding that Washington wanted to “make sure” the social media influencers get “the latest information from an authoritative source.”

According to the Washington Post, some influencers said following the briefing they “felt more empowered to debunk misinformation and communicate effectively about the crisis.” “I’m here to relay the information in a more digestible manner to my followers,” 18-year-old Ellie Zeiler, who has 10.5 million followers, told the Washington Post after the briefing. “I would consider myself a White House correspondent for Gen Z,” the TikTok influencer added.

Others, however, appeared unimpressed by the event. “The energy of the call felt like a press briefing for kindergartners,” said Jules Suzdaltsev, a Ukrainian-born journalist who also operates a popular TikTok channel. The officials had dodged hard questions, he added.

The development comes amid an ongoing Russian military action in Ukraine. Moscow has accused Kiev of failing to implement the Minsk Agreements – a set of accords regulating its relations with the then-rebel regions of the Donbass. The Kremlin also maintains it has launched the operation to protect the people of the Donbass republics, and to “demilitarize” Ukraine.

Kiev has blasted the operation as a completely unprovoked invasion and argues that, in the first instance, it had never planned to attack the two secessionist regions.

The US media have also claimed that a lot of misinformation has surfaced on TikTok and other social media amid the conflict, and that Moscow had reportedly paid Russian influencers to share videos promoting the Kremlin’s narrative.

TikTok blocked all new content and livestreaming from Russia altogether from March 6, citing Russia’s own ‘fake news law’ that prohibits the spreading of false information about the Russian military. The company insisted at that time it was putting the “the safety of our employees and our users” first.

March 12, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

EU bans search engines and social platforms from “reproducing” content from sanctioned Russian media

A wide-sweeping censorship order

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | March 11, 2022

They trained for this day for a long time; particularly by quashing online dissent during the two years of Covid hell, and now the big day is here: once considered an aspirational beacon of democracy, the EU is deploying some of the most egregious-to-date acts of censorship and suppression of free speech and access to information – certainly, at least, for a Western democracy.

And once considered an innovative and exciting company that brings knowledge to the people, and along the way “do no evil” – Google – and its ilk – will be there to help make it happen.

What spurred the European Commission to act this way is the war in Ukraine, and the desire to completely silence the Russian side, by preventing citizens living in EU member countries from being able to see or hear any content other than that approved and pushed by Brussels.

The question of why this is necessary – does the EU really fear people across Europe will believe Russia? Or is this being done to set a precedent that could be “useful” in so many situations down the line?

One can only speculate (until that is banned by decree, too), but what is clear is that the EU thought the price to pay by using hard censorship and authoritarian tactics and thus undermining the very tenets of the bloc is somehow the price worth paying.

And this is what the EU has done. After first banning two Russian media outlets, RT and Sputnik, from broadcasting (which RT is challenging in court), the EU has now gone to Google to make sure that any content produced by these media companies is purged from the search engine, while social media posts “reproducing” it must get deleted.

When RT and Sputnik got banned, there was some push-back from speech advocates in Europe, but those behind the decision vigorously defended it – if at times giving away how fully aware they are of the way their actions are perceived – namely, as Orwellian.

EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (who has been “on fire” these last weeks – he just proposed imposing sanctions on people labeled as spreading misinformation) told members of the European Parliament that the EU in fact “doesn’t have ministers of truth” and dismissed the Russian outlets as not being independent media (as if all media broadcasting in the EU is “independent” and not affiliated with different states.)

He went a step further, accusing them of being “Kremlin’s weapons.” At the same time, another commissioner revealed that the plan is to keep trying to “reach the Russian people and provide them with (EU’s ) information” – effectively saying that the EU hopes to do exactly what it says it is preventing Russia from doing.

There is an email submitted to the Lumen database on March 4, sent by the European Commission and containing a government removal request. Citing a previously adopted regulation to ban RT and Sputnik, the request states that the prohibition the EU intends to impose is to be “very broad and comprehensive.”

The job of internet search services like Google here is to index results with any possible content that the EU has deemed to be “misinformation and propaganda,” as well as websites throughout the world, and delist them.

“It follows from the foregoing that by virtue of the regulation, providers of internet search services must make sure that any link to the internet sites of RT and Sputnik and any content of RT and Sputnik, including short textual descriptions, visual elements, and links to corresponding websites do not appear in the search results delivered to users located in the EU,” the EU notice sent to Google reads.

Social-media-wise, the EU wants posts made by individuals who “reproduce” RT and Sputnik content to be deleted. A reference is made repeatedly to “proportionality” – i.e., between restrictive policies and people’s right to freedom of speech.

“Pursuant to the freedom of speech, media have the right to report objectively on current events and to form their opinions thereon. The freedom of speech also entails that users have the right to receive objective information on current events,” writes the EU, but then adds: “At the same time, the right to free speech can be restricted for legitimate public interests in a proportionate manner.”

At the end of the day, little of this has to do with the current war in the East of Europe. More likely it’s another instance of the authorities using a crisis to slip through dangerous policies that would in normal circumstances receive much more pushback. And once they know they can do it, there is a real danger they will keep doing it any time dissenting voices of various kinds need to be silent.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube to demonetize all Russian users, ban ‘state media’

Google-owned video platform expanding its bans from Europe to worldwide

RT | March 11, 2022

YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced on Friday it would block access to “Russian state media” channels across the globe and block all monetization on its platform inside Russia, citing the conflict in Ukraine.

The video-sharing platform wants to remove content “denying, minimizing or trivializing well-documented violent events,” as it goes against its Community Guidelines, YouTube said in a statement on Friday, specifically referring to content “about Russia’s invasion in Ukraine that violates this policy.”

Having blocked RT and Sputnik in the European Union – at the request of EU governments – on March 1, YouTube announced on Friday it was expanding this censorship to the entire planet, and including all channels “associated with Russian state-funded media.”

The change is “effective immediately,” YouTube said, adding that its systems may take a little while to process it.

YouTube ads have already been “paused” in Russia, but the platform is now extending this to “all of the ways to monetize on our platform” in the country, presumably affecting super-chats and sponsorships as well.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

German Anaesthesiologists: “We will not treat Russian and Belarusian citizens. Our solidarity is with the Ukrainian people!”

eugyppius – March 11, 2022

Remember Ortrud Steinlein, director of the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität Clinic for Human Genetics? She’s the one who declared that, “due to the serious violation of international law by the autocrat Putin, who is obviously mentally disturbed,” she would be “refusing to treat Russian patients.”

Well, that wasn’t an isolated case. It now looks like various Munich physicians got together and worked out this informal sanctions regime among themselves. A few days ago a similar announcement from a private Munich clinic came to light, dating from around the same time and bearing exactly the same message (only in more inflammatory terms):

Munich, 4 March 2022

Dear Colleagues:

We strongly condemn the invasion of the Russian army with the help of the Belarusian government. Russia is not only attacking Ukraine militarily without any justification – this country also threatens Europe, this country threatens our freedom and democracy.

Therefore, from now on and until further notice, we will not treat Russian and Belarusian citizens.

You can save yourself the trouble of registering.

There will be no exceptions, just as Covid-19 and Mr Putin make no exceptions.

In case of doubt, we will dismiss the patients on the day of surgery.

This also applies to patients who have already registered.

Our solidarity is with the Ukrainian people and our measures are the consequences of the military invasion of the Russian army!

After an uproar, the clinic posted a bright-red apology on their website (and also on Facebook):

The reaction to our letter has greatly affected us and made us think. Our intention was to express sympathy with the Ukrainian people and, as other companies have done, to cut business ties with Russia and send a message of support. This idea was not thought through in its entirety at the time. Some have justly criticised the force of our letter, and we accept this criticism in full. Far be it from us to discriminate or exclude patients on the basis of their origin. We apologise for creating this impression. We will continue to treat Russian and Belarusian patients without hesitation.

As a sign of our solidarity, we are donating 10,000.00 Euros to Doctors Without Borders to support their mission in Ukraine.

Wonder of wonders, their aversion to treating Russians didn’t run that deep after all. As soon as it earned them derision, and failed to gain them any virtue points, they were happy to go back to anaesthetising Russians along with everybody else.

Of course, these three lunatics mention Corona in the course of justifying their lunacy. As I said earlier, Corona has politicised the medical profession, and we are seeing what happens when doctors start to think they have special political responsibilities. And all of those deep philosophical debates we had, about the freedom that doctors enjoy to refuse to treat the unvaccinated, are now bearing fruit.

March 11, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

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