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.

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 ALAN MACLEOD IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Government, in Their Own Words”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/20/how-journalists-demonize-venezuelas-government-in-their-own-words/

 

A very interesting piece.

And anyone expects truth in anything from America?

Inside and outside the country, Americans walk through a dense haze of lies.

It resembles a science-fiction tale, but it is real.

It’s what happens when you have an empire instead of a country.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY BEL TREW IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“James Le Mesurier: White Helmets backer found dead near his home in Istanbul

“Former army officer helped start the White Helmets, credited with saving thousands of lives in Syria”

 

People who read widely have known for quite some time that The White Helmets are a fraud.

There are countless tidbits of evidence for the claim, but you have to search them out. You won’t find them in any of the corporate press in America or the parts of Europe, like Britain, which are under America’s thumb.

Most of the Western corporate press goes on praising them, and of course dear old Hollywood even gave them an “documentary film” Oscar.

That’s the very same Hollywood that each year holds a big gala dinner to raise millions and millions of dollars for Israel’s army. The army whose main job is to harshly occupy millions of people who have no rights, and an army, over the last year, which has weekly busied itself ambushing unarmed Gaza protesters from behind a fence, killing about 300 and wounding thousands.

I wouldn’t doubt Hollywood even supplied expertise and supplies for the make-up work used in White Helmet films, but I don’t know that.

The job of The White Helmets has always been to promote local divisions inside Syria and to create provocations that can be used to justify more American or British bombing at desired locations.

They mounted and filmed several “rescue operations” from poison gas attacks which they staged themselves, trying to incriminate Syria’s government. They film their own stuff and distribute it to the Western press. Undoubtedly, they also perform other covert work such as “bomb spotting.”

Their films all have been frauds, using everything from child actors (documented by some critics) and Hollywood make-up to other mislabelled footage.

This outfit represents a true ethical low point in America’s diligent efforts at hybrid and proxy war in the region, a fake humanitarian organization to promote real death and destruction.

How absolutely fitting that it was founded by one of the creeps from MI6.

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

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Iran denies U.S. destroyed an Iranian drone near Persian Gulf

“Trump previously said an Iranian drone got too close to a U.S. warship”

____________________________

Response to a comment saying, “AP is not a credible news organization. It’s very difficult to figure out when they are telling the truth”:

 

Yes, but can you give us the name of even one consistently credible mainline news organization?

I’m not aware of any, and I read a lot.

You can only get at (an approximation of) what really has happened, especially in complex or very important matters, by reading differing points of view – and then interpreting and interpolating. All news sources have biases, every one, including the alternate and foreign press.

And certainly no one can guarantee you the truth in any story or from any source, as various new Internet outfits now pretend to do, outfits which all are not part of a solution to “fake news,” but are indeed themselves a new part of the problem.

They claim authority and expertise and impartiality which are simply impossible for them to have. And impossible, even if they had them, to offer everyone for free. They proclaim having truth much as a tent preacher thumping his Bible while weeping theatrical tears claims having it, and they are just about as credible.

You must do the job of uncovering truth yourself. There is no other way. It is the job of a juror, as in a big court case. Hearing the cross examination of witnesses remains a key method. Judging and weighing the relative credibility of witnesses is another. Listening for contradictions. Judging motivations.

Especially in these days of 24-hour-a-day deception and intrigue and disinformation – all of which have a lot to do with the needs and dark activities of America’s massive empire. Where stakes are great, as in the workings of a world empire, it simply follows that efforts to dissemble and mislead and hide truth are greater.

Things are being done every day which the American government does not want its people, or others, to know about. It does not want to be answerable about its many dark activities. It’s the same for other governments, of course, it’s just that the level of American activity immensely exceeds that of most other governments.

In general, no one ever just gives you truth. Loving mothers and good mates try doing that, but there are many things they themselves do not understand or only partially understand. And they, too, have their biases, as religious or political. If such close and loving people can’t provide you with truth, why would you think strangers, and ones with very complex and little-understood motivations, can do so?

When is the last time any organization or corporation truly gave you anything for free? Whenever we see an ad offering us something for free, the rational response is, what are they really trying to do here? Giving the public things for free is always an advertising or marketing or promotional or information-gathering tool, never a straightforward act.

Do you see information, good sound information, available anywhere for free? Attending university costs a great deal today, and, even there, not everything said or printed is true. Learning the secrets of a trade is costly, requiring a long apprenticeship. Good books are costly. Lectures by notable experts are not free. Travel to places in order to observe is costly.

Even looking-up something on-line is not free. You must have a computer, you must pay an ISP, and you must spend valuable time finding things and negotiating your way around them. Just reading an article requires time and skill and judgment. After all, that’s why traditional academic research requires multiple sources. And why academic journalism teaches having at least two sources for some important claim.

Information, sound reliable information, is not to be had for the price of a newspaper. And certainly not for the flip of a switch. Whether on a television or a computer.

Broadcasters and newspaper publishers are absolutely no different than other enterprises. They have bills to pay. They have obligations to others. They have friends to reward and enemies to punish. They have time and resource constraints. They are not motivated by the theoretical rules of sound journalism day-in, day-out any more than the average company is motivated by the Ten Commandments or the words of Jesus.

Of course, they quote the rules of journalism in public utterances, just as politicians or heads of corporations quote rules of ethics or morality. They may even truly hold them as guiding ideals. But live by them in their every action, day and night? You have to be naïve to believe that.

And we must remember economic realities. Information is costly to obtain, both for news organizations and news followers. There are no free rides.

Apart from many built-in biases, news organizations can’t even afford the resources anymore to attempt to get at truth in all their stories. The entire traditional news industry, print and broadcast, is in relative decline owing to the effects of the Internet on revenues. We have a kind of technological revolution underway, and it affects everyone.

Foreign correspondents? Very few of them left anywhere. They are a mighty expensive luxury. Same for foreign bureaus.

Investigative journalism? Who does that anymore? At least in a serious way.

It costs too much. Just imagine, maintaining even one intelligent and capable reporter for weeks or months, burning through expenses, to pursue the fine points of just one story? It always was a terribly costly proposition, but these days, it almost cannot be done. And it isn’t.

A good second source for all important assertions? Not very likely. Even if possible, it costs too much.

Take a great deal of time to check out what sounds like a sensational scoop? There’s a cost to doing that, and there’s the risk that in the meantime another news source will run the story first.

And then there is the simple and obvious service to government that all news organizations offer. They can’t afford, for many reasons, to make an enemy of government.

Government is the source of approval for mergers and acquisitions in news organizations. It is the source for valuable leaks and various information. It is influential on other corporations and advertisers. It is even a source of advertising itself, in everything from legal notices to employment ads. What corporate news organization has any motivation for alienating government?

The movie-mystery notion of a news source working hard, battling for truth against the powers and interests of government is pretty close to pure fantasy. Not all that different from a Batman movie.

And who wants to be identified publicly as opposing his own country, as it were? This is especially true in a powerful, hyper-patriotic place like the United States. Every major news source there supports every dumb and destructive colonial war you can name. So, do you think you can really trust what they report on the details of those wars? Or their true causes? Or much about the nature of the opponent?

Try finding even one major American news source whose history includes opposition to major destructive policies like Vietnam or the invasion of Iraq. You can’t. At least not until a war like that in Vietnam was well along, and its foolishness and failure were becoming apparent. News sources all close ranks to support the government when the power establishment makes a major move. And the notion of a liberal bias in the American press is absurd for that reason alone, although there are many other reasons too.

And if you look back at history and biography, you find something important. You find motivation. Do you think great news moguls like Hearst or Murdoch or Black were motivated in building their empires by the desire for truth or providing excellent information? No, apart from profits, they want to influence people and governments. Indeed, having influence over a good number of people is itself a negotiable thing, a source either of profit or of even further influence.

Political parties, too, historically, either owned a newspaper or owned the loyalty of one or a number of them. Influence and promotion were the motivations, not the dissemination of truth. And it is no different on the Internet, no matter how large or small the source, no matter whether independent or not. There are undoubtedly some sincere exceptions, but it will take effort on your part to discover them.

A purpose is always being served, and you must do the work of sorting through it all to genuinely learn anything. Of course, you will never learn “the complete truth.” Not only is that a costly notion, it can no longer be supported philosophically. Science teaches us we live in a stochastic universe. We do not have “scientific laws,” as we once thought we had, we have possible outcomes, we have probabilities, we have always, it appears, a degree of uncertainty.

 

INTERESTING FOOTNOTE:

After American claims of having shot down an Iranian drone that was approaching a warship, Iran denied the claims and even joked that maybe America had mistakenly shot down one of its own. At this writing, Iran has published video proving they are correct, video of the American warship from a drone with the video’s timing marks proving the American claims false.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Simple Explanation for the Betrayal of Britain’s Envoy

“Craig Murray has a strong hunch about why someone would leak Kim Darroch’s scathing comments about Trump”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/10/the-simple-explanation-for-the-betrayal-of-britains-envoy/?unapproved=374384&moderation-hash=9e2db8191c3309ba52faed708becf841#comment-374384

 

Very interesting little article.

The portrait here of Kim Darroch is so different than what we see in the mainline British press, it is actually a bit startling.

His newspaper portrait in Britain, at least in the press I read, is of an extremely able man, a classy diplomat.

But what we have here is a kind of British Trump, a crude loud-mouth and abusive man.

This is a terrific example of how a story can be made to appear almost unrecognizably different.

The truth? I am not sure when it comes to government and foreign policy anymore we ever get any truth.

Deception and misrepresentation are the norms simply because governments like those of the United States and Britain are engaged full-time in so many dark imperial projects all over the world.

The people never voted for much of what is being done in their name and might well not support much of it, if only they knew.

I’m afraid this is just one more fragment of evidence – along with such matters as what really has happened in Syria, what really is going on with Iran, why the United States never acts to rein in Israel and impose a fair settlement, day-and-night Russophobia, the assault on China, and so much more – telling us what a dreamworld we now live in. Perhaps “nightmare” is a more fitting word than “dream.”

Almost nothing in our press and from our politicians is real anymore. There’s an entire world of government activity that goes unreported and unexamined. If one insists on using the unattractive term “fake news,” – unattractive because of the class of people who regularly use it – its main application should be to Western governments.

Obviously, under such circumstances, references to “democracy” or even “democratic” are meaningless. The people are simply not aware of what their “elected” governments are doing.

Whatever Kim Darroch’s character really is and whatever the motivation for someone leaking his embarrassing past confidential observations of Donald Trump, the observations, of course, remain valid. We know that from the best possible source, our own regular observations.

Trump is indeed an emperor without any clothes. An embarrassingly obvious man in his words and acts. But, as with so many things in Washington, you are really not allowed to say that.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“A Call to Reinvestigate American Assassinations”

 

While I am completely in sympathy with the idea that the major American political assassinations need re-investigation, I know, at the same time, that it is pretty much a waste of breath to advocate for it.

Why were the original investigations, endowed with large resources of money and personnel, so badly handled?

And, as a long-time student of the John Kennedy case, I can say flatly that the investigation of his assassination was more than badly handled.

It was deliberately and consistently mishandled. It was manipulated.

Who had such power to see that it was mishandled?

Well, those same interests have not gone away. There are new names a couple of generations later, of course, but the interests remain.

Indeed, I think it easy to argue that those interests have only become more powerful inside American society, a society where the disparity between the great bulk of citizens and the privileged has grown immensely since John Kennedy’s time. The country, in many ways, is not recognizable as the same place, the place in which I grew up. Hopes, aspirations, and opportunities have all been blunted or diminished for the bulk of Americans while the privileged establishment has burgeoned to become more powerful than ever.

All of the evidence we have about the American power establishment’s reinvigorated efforts to dominate the globe (following its quiet, grim recognition that America’s relative economic position in the world has seriously deteriorated since the halcyon decades after WWII) – its efforts to pursue “full-spectrum dominance,” its efforts in the bloody Neocon wars, its efforts against Russia and against China, its efforts in Latin America, and its horrific level of spending on the military and on security, including an entirely new kind of security involving the compromise of every single American’s intimate privacy – tells us that the interests which deliberately mishandled investigating Kennedy’s assassination, and did so in two major efforts, are very much still around.

America’s power establishment today lies pretty much around the clock about many subjects. It is simply a way of life for those pursuing great power and undertaking many dark deeds.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

_______________________

Response to a comment about Americans must not surrender but demand the truth:

Oh, yes, I certainly do see a lot of Americans fighting for this, or any other, truth.

Sorry, but your rhetoric achieves little beyond raising your blood pressure.

Americans, in general, today seem quite indifferent to truth of any kind. From embracing nonsense claims about “healthy stuff” and burying their minds in “social media” to accepting the almost continuous military atrocities abroad by America and its close allies.

Americans, for the most part, couldn’t care less about what America does in the Middle East and in other distant places. They certainly don’t want to hear about what really causes all those unpleasant, desperate refugees in the Middle East or in Central America – that is, the activities of their own armed forces. They certainly don’t want to hear about all the massive amounts of death and destruction, none of which would have happened without America’s efforts. And America’s press accommodates the wish completely, never honestly investigating such matters, always supporting the establishment’s “narrative.”

As the melodramatic, much-quoted movie-script line goes, “You can’t handle the truth!” Interestingly, that script line and the movie from which it comes were themselves dishonest defenses of Pentagon interests. So constant and penetrating so deeply into society are the establishment’s efforts to propagandize that popular entertainment is enlisted to the task.

Truth in America has become a rhetorical, argumentative word, devoid of any real meaning. It is even often used pejoratively.

In an empire where wars, coups, dirty operations, and assassinations are part of the week-to-week efforts of government – always lying as it does its dirty work – there is no such thing as truth. There is only “controlling the narrative,” getting our “story out there,” and countless big and little lies. The best of literature, art, music, and certainly science honors truth. Politics and the pursuit of power tend to avoid it completely.

Much of the rhetoric in the American “fake news” controversies is on the level of Baptist tent preachers blubbering about Satan rather than saying anything genuine about truth. Truth, despite all kinds of twisted arguments and insincere discussions, in most cases, actually isn’t that difficult a concept to understand or to adhere to. There really is something of the elegant simplicity of Keats’ lines about truth being beauty and beauty truth.

Something either happened or it didn’t, and honest investigators, whether journalists or criminal investigators or special commissions, either report it or they don’t. But it should be obvious that where whole areas of potential information are simply ignored – as in the Middle East today where never once is the Syrian or Iranian or Russian point of view reported or discussed. Always, the same sources are quoted on almost everything. It should be obvious there is no honest effort to report truth.

But most humans are just built that way. Whether in religious, political, or social matters, the original endowment of understanding and point of view provided by society from birth is not questioned and certainly not deeply investigated. The limited number who do question or investigate end up being regarded as eccentrics or kooks or geniuses not understood by most.

Going back to Kennedy’s death, a great many witnesses and valid pieces of evidence were simply ignored while, in a number of cases, lesser witnesses and highly dubious, even compromised, evidence was admitted into the record. Of course, that is only a fraction of what was done badly in the Warren report.

It is the same for every aspect of America’s imperial involvement in the world. Interests totally overshadow truth. Truth indeed becomes quite “inconvenient.”

The Kennedy and King assassinations revolved around this same central gravitational mass. Kennedy’s assassination was about American establishment concerns with Cuba, and to a lesser extent with Russia, and King’s was about an establishment frightened at the prospect of millions of young black men being mobilized against wars and for greater justice at home.

If you doubt that assertion about establishment concerns with King, just look, all these decades later, at the huge bellowing, angry noise in America over some black football players briefly, respectfully kneeling at a game during the national anthem in protest against police violence on the streets, where American police kill about three people every single day, people who are mostly unarmed, many of them being black, and the police involved almost never are charged with anything.

King was okay, could be tolerated at least, when he just gave “Sermons on the Mount,” so to speak, about justice and equality. But when he later began actively opposing a major war and made fiery speeches to striking black workers in various cities, well, that became a very different matter. With his fame and eloquence, he was starting to challenge the interests of those who really ran America.

The same establishment was furious about Castro, whose magnetism appealed even to some young Americans, and who very much challenged the traditional American Plantation System in Latin America, and great resources were spent by CIA trying to do everything from killing him or toppling his government and to sabotaging the economy and demonizing his words and acts. Unless you go into the literature of the time, it is hard today to appreciate the fierce intensity of that reaction. And those horrible Russians, imperial America’s damned Carthaginians, were actually helping him.

The only acceptable response was the square-jawed, fierce-eyed, ready-to-kill one displayed by innumerable American players of the time – Guy Bannister, J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon kind of stuff. John Kennedy completely lacked that quality, even though he delivered some pretty martinet-sounding speeches at times which I found rather unsettling.

His gross failures – as judged by the square-jawed set of powerful American figures – in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in the Cuban Missile Crisis, made him a marked man. His firing the CIA’s top three men, all establishment darlings, after Kennedy’s being humiliated by the CIA’s fiasco at the Bay of Pigs didn’t help. Nor did his angry promise to one day splinter the CIA into pieces, especially when combined with the fact that he made concessions to Russia over Cuba – my God, a promise never to invade again! Can you imagine that? – and established back-channel communications with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It was all even further fired up by insider knowledge of Kennedy’s intimate relationship with Mary Pinchot Meyer, an eastern establishment family dissident and non-conformist artist-type, and his reportedly having been introduced to some drugs by her in their trysts. She was, we learn from later accounts, the only woman with whom he had a relationship of equals and perhaps the only woman he ever came close to loving, and she was what later would be called very much a peacenik.

Truth and bloody empire cannot coexist. Lies are an inherent part of all the killing and oppression required by imperial enterprises, and since America’s enterprise is global in extent, its crimes and lies are many. We see this clearly in the contemporary case of Israel with its efforts to establish itself as a kind of miniature replica of imperial America in its region. Some of its many ruthless efforts do get recorded, but it is only some, and a compliant Western press minimizes what they report and uses all the euphemisms they can muster. The participants in empire always avoid, as much as possible, direct observation or reporting of their efforts. Always. That’s why secret security services are called secret and why classifying things is virtually an industry in Washington.

That’s why we can still look at old photos of Winston Churchill and think of him as that great cherubic-faced defender of democracy and all good things Western. He was in fact a dedicated imperialist, a man ready to do anything from machine-gunning revolting peasants to making ugly deals with criminals. The only reason he was not willing to do a deal with Hitler, who offered him one around guarantees for the British Empire, was his inability to accept having one country dominate the Continent, reflecting a very long-standing, basic principle of British foreign policy, and his own vanity – and he was immensely vain – in regarding himself as a greater figure than Herr Hitler, as he called him in his memoirs. He was not an enemy of tyrants in general. He was certainly not a defender of human rights in general. And he often laughed at aspects of democracy. In his World War II memoirs, you can clearly sense, too, some admiration of Stalin.

I don’t care which aspect of American government you talk about, it’s always the same. The FBI is a perfect example. The history of that organization is extremely dark and unpleasant. Yet today, we get all these assertions, during the controversy concerning Trump and the FBI, about this or that besmirching the FBI’s reputation. The FBI, in fact, has no reputation, beyond one manufactured by its public relations organization and the ever-supporting main-line press. The arguments about it all are phony.

Below is a piece about the FBI I wrote years ago, and nothing has really changed. It could readily be updated to double its length with a variety of tales.

Now, apart from other matters, they are in the business of trying to influence American elections, but even that is not new. It was learned just the other day in an interview with a former senior FBI official that a regular part of the FBI’s counterintelligence operations inside the United States involved working to prevent any seriously progressive or leftish politicians from being nominated for seats in Congress.

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/the-dreadful-record-of-the-fbi/ 

Here are a few other points:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/02/09/john-chuckman-comment-i-am-amazed-at-how-some-americans-get-so-worked-up-only-now-about-an-fbi-that-has-always-been-political-and-corrupt-americas-stasi/

Here is a brief discussion around one of the only truly valuable documents ever released by government on the John Kennedy assassination.

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

Yet there has been no public controversy or big discussion about the document, which contains, unmistakably, threads of the real truth. It has been all but been completely ignored by the press.

The authorities releasing this were so confident in the public’s unquestioning mindset that they weren’t concerned when they did so, and it appears they were right to think that way. Either that or they blundered, but it still had almost zero impact.

Which is to say, that none of this historical stuff, the stuff that would be pored over in yet another investigation, can make any difference unless the structure under which investigations must operate, the very structure of the way America is governed, is changed, and just what are the chances of that?

Here is a good summary of what I mean:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/john-chuckman-comment-how-american-politics-really-work-why-there-are-terrible-candidates-and-constant-wars-and-peoples-problems-are-ignored-why-heroes-like-julian-assange-are-persecuted-and-r/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CHARLES BAUSMAN IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Dear Elon [Musk], We Can Build a Media Fact-Check Machine for You – We’ve Got the Know-How'”

 

Dear RI Editor, The Very Idea of Fact-Check Machines is Absurd – No Matter Who Builds Them.

No one has both the command of quality information and the impartiality of viewpoint even to attempt this.

The very concept is an illegitimate child of the “fake news” phenomenon.

We’ve always had facts and errors and deliberate propaganda mixed into our news since the first newspaper was printed. It has always been the job of readers to sort things out for themselves. No one can do that for them.

Readers must read and cross-check and critically compare while taking account of the likely motives of each source if they want to be at all informed. It’s a bit like writing an academic paper, you cannot take one source as authority, but it is a bit more complicated than academic papers because with the news we have the undeniable presence of deliberate lies and propaganda, perhaps more so today because there are so very many dark projects being carried on by major actors, projects they do not want others to understand. Some part of “the truth” can be teased out with effort, but even then, no claim can be made to complete accuracy.

The only solid truth we have is science, but science doesn’t deal with the dark labyrinths of human affairs and politics.

What we call “truth” in journalism and politics is something altogether different. It’s about trying to have a rough working knowledge or perspective about some event. Unfortunately, these are generally the kinds of event – affairs of state and foreign policy and wars – where everyone reporting on them is either reluctant to tell you what they know or is actively interested in hiding at least part of what happened or simply doesn’t know anything but doesn’t want to admit the fact.

There is no magic formula anyone can offer for this kind of truth. You can’t run laboratory experiments, repeating them many times, as you would in hard science.

The very idea of “truth checks” or “truth machines” reminds me strongly of the Millennial generation’s constant flow of fads, as with the new best vitamin supplement, the new best herbal preparation, or the new best yoga routine – unscientific nonsense almost all of it or, at best, tidbits of scientific findings stretched beyond their supportable limits, but if you enjoy indulging in it as a pastime, go ahead.

Public affairs though have much greater consequences – including a great deal of death and destruction as well as the spending of vast amounts of money – than whether someone happens “to get it wrong” about a vitamin supplement. So, a conscientious citizen’s making an effort to understand is important.

As soon as Musk announced his “media truth” idea, he went further down in my estimation – further, that is, than the P. T. Barnum- style self-promoter that he indeed is – down there to the lower regions along with the likes of Zuckerberg, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Washington Post, and spokespeople for the State Department and NATO, and the whole shady gang pretending to hand us truth as though it were a plum on a platter.

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON BRITAIN’S WORST PAPER, THE GUARDIAN

 

I have before called The Guardian, once a broadsheet newspaper of respectable dullness, today’s worst newspaper in the world when it comes to journalism.

As if to further bolster its claims, below is a list of items taken from the front page around noon on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The titles – ranging from genuinely childish to asinine – tell the story of a newspaper which has become almost a case study in “fake news,” fake news from the establishment, the most dangerous kind. A paper that was once respectably tedious has become flashily, even garishly, irresponsible, bombastic, and prejudiced.

When it isn’t conducting all-out assaults on someone its editors hate – examples have included Jeremy Corbyn, a thoroughly decent political leader of the British Labour Party, against whom they conducted a months-long McCarthyite campaign over completely unsupported charges of anti-Semitism to comments on his dressing in an unacceptably ugly way, and Donald Trump, who has had everything from the speculated small size of his penis featured to a hundred unsupported claims of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia hurled at him.

When they aren’t furiously attacking someone, they literally are falling over themselves trying to build up someone they do like for whatever reason – examples include proven criminal lowlife and liar, Tony Blair, inept, never-closes-his-mouth politician, Owen Smith, and London’s new mayor, Sadiq Khan, who does nothing but grant self-promoting interviews. Establishment all, and quite dismally so.

To spice things up and maintain some kind of vague claim about still being a progressive publication, we get a long trail of useless or genuinely rubbishy articles along the lines of what it is like trying to have sex when you have wooden legs or the perils of a vegetarian in a restaurant trying to avoid inhaling the smoke from barbequed meats. Then we have declarations of how someone bravely faces all the waves of misogyny that are crashing over us, or why I am getting a German passport to leave the UK, horrible place that it has become for racism and prejudice. These articles enlighten no one about anything, but they do make loud self-applauded claims of tolerance and allow for eye-catching, trashy headlines to raise readership, and they employ the well-established advertising principle of great repetition keeping a theme on readers’ minds as though it really were something important.

In eight years of Obama’s continuous killing in half a dozen countries, there was never a concern raised, never a doubt expressed over what was going on. More than that, there was very little truth told about those events, the bloody events of Syria’s induced horror, for example, always being blurred over, never explained, and indeed, outright lied about many times, with re-written versions of the official line from Washington being offered as reportage and analysis. Shabby almost beyond belief because, while it is all just what we expect from a Washington Post or New York Times, this is a British paper and one with historic attachments away from the power establishment.

That is because today’s Guardian marches shoulder-to-shoulder not with the ordinary workers of its past, but with the ghastly establishment who brought us the bloodshed, refugees, and terror-blowback of the Neocon Wars. It joined their team, so to speak, some years ago. We see that in everything from its reportage and comment to its regular efforts to rehabilitate an utterly discredited lying killer like Tony Blair and its sycophantic support – and that’s not in the least an exaggeration – of Hillary Clinton, who, without a doubt, would have proved the most duplicitous and murderous President ever.

 Here is The Guardian dump of Trump-hating articles for Inaugural Day:

 

“The honeymoon is already over for President Trump”

Richard Wolffe     – whom I would like to ask, what honeymoon would that be?

 

“Late-night hosts on the inauguration: ‘How is that a president?’”

Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers took aim at the inauguration proceedings and shared concern over the future: ‘We’re so fucked’     – note the language declaring how tolerant The Guardian is.

 

“Women will march against Trump. We may lose, but it’s still worth it”

Suzanne Moore     – who undoubtedly writes from a leather wing chair in a comfortable Mayfair flat.

 

“Music: this week’s anti-Trump songs reviewed’

Michael Hann     – note that is just “this week’s.”

 

‘I’m going to speak out as often as I can, otherwise I can’t live with myself’

Paul Auster     – well, I don’t think he has to worry about an outlet: The Guardian will print his every gasp.

 

“How to Trump-proof your life (in a minute) – video”        – now, there’s assinity, and writ large.

 

“The Peace Ball: black brilliance and resistance on the eve of the Trump era”

Steven W Thrasher     – who should be asked; resistance to what?

 

“Why the next four years will be a test for all of us’

Yaa Gyasi     – a test in what? Writing meaningless article titles?

 

“Why my seat at the inauguration is empty”

 “I will not be celebrating the swearing-in of a president who rode racism, sexism, xenophobia and bigotry to the White House”   

Barbara Lee      – she may have left some name-calling quality out, but I don’t know what it would be.

 

“Terrified of Trump: What we learned at Davos 2017”       – someone was sent to Davos to learn nothing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY OWEN JONES IN THE GUARDIAN

“Antisemitism is a poison – the left must take leadership against it”

Owen Jones, I don’t quite know what to say about such an idiotic assertion.

To whom do you think you are preaching? Those who genuinely are anti-Semitic – just as those with other special hates – are certainly not going to heed or even read your prattle.

And why in God’s name does “the left” have a special, or any, responsibility here?

I’ll tell you where this fraudulent notion of yours comes from: Israel has always castigated the Left in Western countries.

And why?

Because liberals and progressives have long criticized Israel’s brutal behavior towards the Palestinians, as they very much should do.

A person who embraces liberty and democratic values can never approve of what Israel has done to the people of Palestine for more than half a century.

Israel’s leaders know that, so they play the ugly game of throwing around the epithet “anti-Semitism.”

We even get books written about imagined contemporary huge increases in “anti-Semitism,” when an honest author would call it what is, an increase in the abhorrence of the government of Israel.

The government of Israel has so overplayed its hand for years in this – always, mind you, supported by the press, as here with Owen Jones – that the epithet literally is losing not only its force, it is losing its meaning.

So, despite the historical fact that real anti-Semitism has always been associated with the Right, especially the brutally ignorant Right, we have the Left being charged with anti-Semitism, or in the case of this column, charged with a special responsibility for anti-Semitism.

Simply outrageous.

You cannot defend what you have written here, just as Israel’s government – a truly Right-wing, fascist-oriented government which makes Donald Trump seem open-minded by comparison – cannot sustain its name-calling nonsense.