John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“Old Ideas in New Bottles

“A new front group preaches restraint while embracing interventionism” [Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft]

 

It is interesting that Philip Giraldi calls American think tanks “fronts.”

That was a term much used during the Cold War for various organizations around the world regarded by the FBI or CIA as covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union.

It works well for American think tanks, which I’ve traditionally referred to as “propaganda mills.”

Of course, that is really the job of any of them, getting out propaganda and disinformation under the guise of disinterested analysis by experts.

The experts are often given high-blown academic-sounding titles, as Senior Fellow, and an effort is made to keep the tone and appearance of an academic campus.

But the papers, books, films, and speeches of any of them are anything but disinterested. They always have a bias, with each of the many such organizations specializing in a subject or range of subjects of concern to its chief wealthy sponsor or sponsors.

I don’t understand the gullibility of Americans on the matter of think tanks.  Many seem to believe that extremely wealthy people are supporting genuinely neutral analysis just for the public good. Commercial news sources – as television and radio stations and others – frequently cite think-tank output as though it offered facts. Of course, the various news media are getting free “filler” for their programs while effectively serving as megaphones for the institutions. Their citations also tend to reinforce the authority of think tanks.

Seems a naïve belief, but this is America we are talking about, the land of P. T. Barnum, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street. Why would anyone believe that extremely wealthy individuals and organizations would fork over millions of dollars a year just to advance human knowledge? Even when wealthy people do pay for a genuine academic facility or library, they want it named after themselves.

And a really ugly truth in America is that many “real” universities now are much engaged in the same business, either through an institute of some kind or more generally with the many rules and restrictions put on publication of controversial matters.  The practices exist because they are profitable and to avoid offending some donor or donors.

America, where people are, for their entire lifetimes, submerged in a kind of electromagnetic cloud of advertising and propaganda of all descriptions. From selling Twinkies and military recruitment to hamburgers and candidates for office. Americans, who believed well after the terrible invasion of Iraq that they just hadn’t yet found where Saddam hid all those “weapons of mass destruction,” or, years after the holocaust of Vietnam, that the communists were still hiding American prisoners of war somewhere for some unknown dark purpose.

So just like the old CIA disinformation man who once spoke of sitting down to his “mighty Wurlitzer,” its keys representing the various cooperating commercial publications, to get “something out there,” think tanks represent another approach to doing the same thing.

The “fake news” controversy in recent years and “fact checking” operations suggest how thickly clouded over things have become, for they themselves are just new kinds of flim-flam intended to misguide or confuse. Everyone of almost any consequence in America is engaged in selling you something. Only the individual, and with considerable effort, can sort his or her way through it all.

John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“What if China fails to contain the coronavirus outbreak?”

 

Sorry, I find that a poor headline to be running. Indeed, rather irresponsible.

First, China is doing everything humanly and scientifically possible.

The effort is enormous and costly, everything from closing large areas down to instantly building containment hospitals and conducting massive research and testing.

Two, the virus still is not the plague the press is making it out to be. It is spreading faster than anyone first thought, but infection is a fairly mild experience for many.

The numbers who have died do not yet resemble what we see every flu season in, say, the United States. Many thousands die, especially the old, unnoted year after year.

Three, the rate of growth is definitely slowing, its graph line is flattening, and there are indications that the outbreak will wind up in a fairly short time period, perhaps a couple of weeks or so.

Four, in light of Trump’s extreme hostility towards China, unfortunately shared to some degree by Trudeau’s disagreeable government, everyone should be very guarded about negative statements during these events.

It can look very much like joining America’s many efforts to discredit or belittle China.

And last, the CBC’s coverage has been excessive. Maybe half a dozen stories a day. That generates its own sense of panic for many.

______________________

Reply to a comment below, saying: “We’re all doomed unless the Canadian government can keep anybody who has been to China out of Canada.”

Doomed? Please, this is not a matter for superstition or religion. Many who get the virus are not even seriously affected.

Your words reflect the excessive coverage of the press in promoting fear.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that American security agencies are at work fanning the flames, getting “stories” out there.

Trying to seriously damage China’s economy, hurt its reputation. They certainly did that during the Hong Kong demonstrations and riots.

They do such things routinely, pumping out rumors and fears. They do it in places like Iraq, and they do it in places where they are trying to overthrow a government, as in Venezuela or Bolivia. It’s called disinformation, and the CIA has platoons of clever, well-paid people who work to generate and distribute it.

Oh, and by the way, viruses spread in many ways. Already there have been cases abroad of people who had no contact with China.

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY KATE NG IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“British warship scrambles to respond to Russian vessel moving into Channel”

“’Leaving our families at this time of year is especially difficult, but national security doesn’t stop for Christmas,’ says ship’s commanding officer”

 

What a truly ridiculous article.

 

“Scrambles to respond”

“Especially hard this time of year”

“Tireless efforts”

 

This was a training ship full of young Russian cadets on a training exercise in a body of water everyone on the planet is entitled to freely enter.

They represent about the same “threat level” as a big gathering of Boy Scouts.

I don’t know about the Royal Navy’s efforts this way historically, but no one would have considered such an event worth reporting before Russo-phobia.

Russo-phobia manufactured and promoted ceaselessly by the United States.

And I guess editors at The Independent feel they must do their loyal bit.

You might call the incident, “Monty Python Takes on The Russian Navy.”
 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Excellent Paul Craig Roberts Post – Why He Fights for Truth (and You Should Too)”

 

I don’t know about Roberts’ specific claims concerning Wikipedia, although I have no reason to doubt them.

The one thing that is certain for me is that Wikipedia literally has become a delivery vehicle for disinformation from the CIA and Pentagon and other American security agency sources, almost laughably so.

Pick any topic you like in world affairs and international politics, then check out some very recent event, and, bingo, you’ll find an article on Wikipedia. Maybe several.

Usually, they will be fairly long ones, ones giving a sense of authority and completeness. Even citations and references.

But the articles always, always have a slant, one that is not hard to see if you are anything other than a faithful tithing member of America’s Patriot Church.

The articles are not the kind of material one found on Wikipedia years ago when its operation was original but amateurish. They are not just efforts to inform people.

They are clearly tailored to influence public opinion, many of them likely coming from a “basement boiler-room” operation in Langley, Virginia.

Every single major American hi-tech or Internet company now has been recruited into service by the imperial establishment. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and others.

And American politicians go on and on, quite insincerely it seems to me, about Huawei serving the Chinese government?

I just have to laugh at the effort, designed both as a new front in the dangerous war on China and as an effort by American interests to assume a gracious pose of objectivity, fairness, and being “above the fray,” when they are anything but.

Every major information resource in America – in the press, broadcasting, Hollywood, and on-line media – has been pressed into service for telling “the American story” and distinguishing “the bad guys.”

It’s exactly the work of Orwell’s Winston Smith in 1984’s Oceania, constantly re-writing or re-interpreting history and past events from newspapers and books. Exactly, except that it is so technologically advanced, and, because the Internet now reaches close to everyone in advanced societies, the reach of the effort is breath-taking

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY HAMZA ABU AL-TARABEESH IN MONDOWEISS

 

“Five years on, a reporter from Gaza remembers the 2014 war”

 

Just a note on words.

Sorry, but I can’t help it, I am always offended when anyone calls one of Israel’s periodic savage attacks on Gaza a “war.”

“War” generally implies two forces of at least some rough equivalence. Otherwise, no conflict would take place, as the greatly weaker side would avoid a fight and retreat.

But you can’t retreat when your home and neighborhood are being assaulted. And where do you run to when you live in a giant open-air prison surrounded by fences and automated machine-gun towers?

No, you cannot dignify Israel’s ruthless assaults on Gaza with the word “war.”

One side has jets, guided missiles, tanks, artillery, armored soldiers, and satellite intelligence while the other has hand-held weapons?

That is the work of the worst kind of cowards, the work of heavily-armed men who kill trapped opponents and women and children and who blow-up homes.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Three dead and hundreds injured as protests on Gaza border turn violent

Total killed now stands at 41 since unrest started in March”

 

A ridiculous headline because of its ambiguity.

From the start, Israel’s response has been violence, extreme violence.

The protests are noisy and unpleasant, but they have not really “turned violent.”

The demonstrators are unarmed, but Israeli snipers keep shooting batches of them, killing, among others, two well-marked journalists and some children. Something in the neighborhood of a thousand have received wounds from guns.

Israel’s only real purpose here is not in protecting itself from violence but to make the demonstrators feel the utter futility of their efforts, to demonstrate, yet again, Israel’s overwhelming military strength and its readiness to kill on very little provocation and without compunction.

It’s all stuff we knew, but this brutal state never tires of showing us again.

This week-long event is only rightly termed the Passover Massacre.

__________________________

Response to a comment, “Israel was established largely to provide a safe haven for oppressed Jewish people”:

Yes, as to why, in part, Israel was re-created, but the great tragedy of it is that it was always something of an unrealistic project, bound to be a moral and ethical failure in the face of millions of Palestinians whose towns and farms were stolen as well as the notion that Israel must have only one kind of people. I know there are a fair number of non-Jewish citizens, but their presence was an accident of 1948, and important Israeli leaders do not regard them as either desirable or permanent. More than a few have advocated their expulsion.

As for the many more Palestinians in the occupied territories, they aren’t going anywhere, no matter what horrors Israel inflicts on them. And just where would they go anyway? Who in the region is offering to take millions of refugees? Who anywhere is ready to take millions of refugees? The United States, whose grotesquely unbalanced support of Israel prevents a decent solution, isn’t ready to take even a limited number of refugees from its own bombing campaigns in places like Libya and Syria.

General Dayan, back in the days of the 1967 War, said Israel would have to make the Palestinians miserable enough to want to leave. And that’s just what Israel has never stopped working toward, just with highs and lows in the harshness of the effort. But they are not leaving. The ugly sniper killings plus countless other incidents show Israel’s violent frustration with this reality.

In a way, the demonstrations and Israel’s extreme brutality towards them hide something far larger and more fundamental and ongoing: conditions in Gaza, home to 1.5 million, are approaching the level of not being able to sustain human life, and that’s entirely Israel’s doing, its deliberate and immoral doing.

It is stunning that the world can sit back and watch this all happening. Virtually all of our Western press and politicians just shut their eyes. And even the press that does cover it in the smallest degree, often uses euphemisms to describe things.

It is simply the greatest single shame on earth at this time.

The men who lead Israel seem to have learned, from the suffering of their European ancestors under the Nazis, only how to be extremely brutal and vile themselves.

 

 

NOTE: While the deaths in Gaza appear to be reasonably consistently reported, the wounded are not. It is difficult to get a fix on the number, which, in any case is very high. Looking at different sources, one finds different numbers. The UN, in its latest rather ineffectual call for an end to the violence, cited more than 5,500 having been injured by gunshots.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY OWEN JONES IN THE GUARDIAN

“We can no longer pretend the British press is impartial”

Well, Mr. Owen Jones, I can’t imagine who it is that you are addressing.

No well-read person, at least one with fully-operating critical faculties, has ever pretended that the press is impartial.

Bias and various kinds of favoritism and propaganda have been with us for as long as the press has existed.

Indeed, in the 18th century, early political parties started their own newspapers, or formed alliances with existing ones, precisely to get across their views of things.

One of the oldest tools of outfits like the old Nazi Party or the Soviet Communist Party was to create newspapers tailored to their propaganda needs.

The apparent level of bias or propaganda may heat up or cool down at various times, as with the Guardian’s on-again, off-again campaign over nonexistent anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party, but it is as much an enduring reality as the sun’s rising.

The record of “distinguished” newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post is literally riddled with advocacy, propaganda, and even disinformation. Actual CIA people were discovered more than once working for them.

An old CIA hand in the business of “getting stories out there” once told of sitting down to his “mighty Wurlitzer organ” and hitting the keys, by which he was referring to the various publications and columnists who cooperated.

Just why do you think all the old press Moghuls always wanted to own press empires?

It is for the power to influence others, to intimidate or accommodate governments, it is for the entree that influence gives in high places and the ability to gain treatment favorable to your interests or desires. The ability to make a politician look good or bad to millions of readers has proved a very powerful tool in getting what you want.

The press is not, and never has been, about genuine news and journalism, although of course some happens along the way almost by accident as it were.

It really is only in the advertising brochures for journalism schools that we find language which naively speaks of journalistic principles.

You know the last time we had a big heroic public story about journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, it actually proved in the end less than heroic. Woodward had long-established intelligence connections and would later be found doing such wonderful things as writing a phony book praising president George Bush’s ability and character

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO ANOTHER COMMENT IN THE INDEPENDENCE

Reader comment:

“It has done nothing but kill people for 65 years, having invaded every neighbor that it has, many of them two or three times.”

Israel was attacked in 48, 67 and 73 by armies (variously) from Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Israel risked being annihilated in all these wars.

Read some history – don’t parrot what you’ve read on far-left hate sites.”

Your comment is arrogant and uninformed. It simply repeats the David and Goliath myths manufactured by the Israeli Ministry of Truth for American consumption.

It is you who should read some history.

The 1967 War was engineered by Israel. Yes, some Arabs attacked, but only after an elaborate series of aggressive and provocative acts by Israel. It was what Israel wanted because its government had made an elaborate calculation ahead and was sure it would win fairly quickly. The prize was all of Palestine and part of Syria.

In the War, Israel also betrayed its best allies.

De Gaulle, a defender of young Israel, warned that he wouldn’t support conquest, but he was ignored.

The United States told Israel not to turn their armor north after defeating Egypt, but that’s just what Israel did because the entire intent of that war was to conquer what Israel still occupies to this day. Just ask yourself why else it still holds millions of people captive and has worked so hard to make their lives miserable as an incentive for their leaving?

In order to turn the armor in the Sinai quickly, Israel had to eliminate its Egyptian prisoners, and that is what it did. It shot hundreds of POWs, much as WWII Germans sometimes did.

To cover this up from the United States and to cover up turning armor north, it attacked the American surveillance ship, USS Liberty, trying desperately for two hours to sink it with everything the pilots had. This was not an error as Israel claimed later, the ship was not only well-marked, Israel had been told of its presence, and the Israeli attack pilots who first buzzed the ship waved to the waving crew.

As to 1948, well, please, it was Israel who was slaughtering Palestinians, driving them out of their own land to seize their farms, homes, and villages – all re-named afterward. There were several documented mass atrocities by people like the Stern Gang, Irgun, and other Jewish terror organizations. Hundreds of civilians were shot and Palestinian women were raped. The hope was that all Palestinians would simply run away as the rumors spread. I should hope some Arab states responded with anger, but they made only a half-hearted effort.

1973 was indeed an attack by Egypt against Israel, but it happened in light of all I’ve written above and far more.

Israel has demonstrated not an ounce of ethics in its 65 years. Duplicity and killing have been the chief features of Israeli policy over the entire period. Let’s not forget several invasions of Lebanon, killing tens of thousands, creating a years-long occupation (against which Hezbollah was formed, an army of genuine freedom-fighters, not terrorists), and using such horrible weapons as large numbers of cluster bombs on civilians.

And then America invaded Iraq, largely on Israel’s behalf, killing a million. Now Israel and America have terrorists doing the same thing in Syria.

It has been a completely destructive and destabilizing history.