Media and conflict

On March 21 this year, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) published an article headlined Coronavirus in Russia: How Putin’s disinformation efforts could backfire at home and written by Judy Twigg, professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University. Take a look and get a sense of its quality, balance and bias. Having read it, I submitted the following comment underneath: I’m dismayed by this article. While there is no doubt that Russia is (mis)using information, this sort of thing must be seen as a tool, or weapon, in a conflict – a conflict Russia has with the 29-member NATO alliance. It is normal praxis for such high-ranking, respected and reliable media as yours to not talk about “the other” side’s weapons but looking at armament dynamics on both (or all) sides of a conflict formation. Just pointing fingers at one and keep quiet about the other side risks to...

Med udenrigsminister Jeppe Kofod i spidsen er Danmark nu på vej ud i sin største udenrigspolitiske skandale – det siger en del – siden besættelsen af Irak. Ifølge denne artikel på DR.dk er hverken Udenrigspolitisk Nævn eller Grønlandsudvalget blevet orienteret om USA’s “offer you can’t refuse” til Grønland – som fremstillet af den amerikanske ambassadør i København, Carla Sands, på Altinget.* © Jan Oberg Folketingsmedlemmer fra både SF og Dansk Folkeparti kalder USA’s udmelding “forkastelig” og “uhørt.” Tidligere udenrigsminister, Martin Lidegaard, siger at han ikke er blevet orienteret om det. Regeringen er altså enten blevet informeret af USA men har holdt forhandlingerne hemmelig eller også er USA nu i færd med at købe Grønland bag ryggen på Danmark. Udenrigsministerens måde at svare på i ovenstående artikels video lugter langt væk af at der er noget, der slet ikke stemmer. Og det han citeres for viser, at han ikke har forstået...

Part 1 Governments have spent trillions on preparing for military threats created by their own policies. No one prioritised human and societal security. The unique over-reaction to COVID-19 should worry us much more than the virus itself. It can be seen as a panicky attempt to cover-up the failure of an outdated militarist security policy. #coronaissecuritypolitics Part 2 of this series • Part 3 • Part 4 Jan Oberg April 2, 2020 The Coronavirus is a comparatively small killer Over the last 3 months, about 40.000+ people have died worldwide because of (or with) the Coronavirus. No other phenomenon in contemporary history has caused so many drastic decisions in democratic and authoritarian governments alike as thi pandemic. Constitutions, a series of freedoms, including the freedom of movement, and much else have been suspended and new emergency laws passed fast enough to qualify for the Guinness World Records. Not to diminish...

Julian Assange of Wikileaks languishes in a British jail during a too-long wait for a court to decide if he can be extradicted to the US where the government has made clear that it wants to put him on trial on charges that could land him in prison for the rest of his life, even though President Donald Trump was happy to quote from Wikileaks research on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, during his campaign for president. “I love Wikileaks”, he said. The British and to a lesser extent the US press have done a poor job in uncovering state secrets in their country’s foreign policy until The Guardian and The New York Times linked up with Assange to publish his most damning revelations. And now after a long winding series of events Assange is being punished by a type of confinement that persuaded Nils Melzer, the UN’s rapporteur on torture,...

By Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) March 19, 2020 Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Originally posted on Swiss Propaganda Research’s official website on July 2017 (updated December 2019) here Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members for decades have shaped US foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member famously explained, they transformed the American republic into a global empire, albeit a “bene­volent” one. Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration depicts for the first time the extensive media network of the CFR and its two major international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group (mainly covering the US and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North...

We hear next to nothing about these sanctions in the so-called free media – primary sanctions by the US hitting Iran directly, secondary sanctions by the US demanding other countries – the EU and NATO allies in particular – to implement its sanctions, i.e. to accept that US sanctions laws shall apply to them as sovereign states. The EU has not been able to get its acts together and respect the nuclear deal, or JCPOA: not in autumn 2015 when it could not find a way to temporarily host 1,5 million refugees arriving as asylum seekers from countries destroyed predominantly by the EU/NATO members themselves – and not now when the coronavirus hits Europe and they have let China be the one who helps their neighbour Italy. On March 15, 2020, I was asked by Iran’s PressTV to comment on these matters in the wake of Iranian foreign minister, Dr...

By Judith Deutsch March 10, 2020 The world situation is much worse than generally acknowledged. This December, the coinciding meetings of NATO and of the climate change Conference of the Parties (COP25) were barely reported, much less analyzed, even though the delegates held the fate of humanity in their hands. To some degree, both meetings are secret, and their unelected delegates are not accountable to the public. COP has met far from the ‘maddening crowd’ ever since the large protests at Copenhagen COP15. NATO provides credibility, flexibility, and anonymity in equal doses and shields member states from legal and political accountability. NATO policy is not to reveal which member state participated in a military operation.(1) NATO countries refuse to sign the nuclear ban treaty and now legitimize a nuclear-weapons first strike. To judge by the results delegates in both organizations chose to ignore both science and the human situation. Originally...

By Johan Galtung March 3, 2020 Some 50 years ago I had been puzzled so much by two problems in connection with foreign news that I decided to do some research on reporting – Cuba, Cyprus, Congo – published first time in January 1963.(*) The first problem was empirical: how do events become news?  There are enormities of events happening, at any point of observation, by professional journalists, foreign correspondents or not: how come that some are elevated to the level of news?  What is news anyhow? The second problem was more normative: why this predilection for negative news, something bad – to somebody – happening?  Why, but then also why not?  You are driving on a road and the flash on the radio “there is a boulder blocking the road around the next sharp turn” matters more than “the road ahead is curvy but smooth”.  The positive and the...

By Dean Baker Last month George Soros had a New York Times column arguing that Mark Zuckerberg should not be running Facebook. (Does the NYT reserve space on its opinion page for billionaires?) The gist of Soros’ piece is that Zuckerberg has made a deal with Trump. He will allow all manner of outrageous lies to be spread on Facebook to benefit Trump’s re-election campaign. In exchange, Trump will defend Zuckerberg from efforts to regulate Facebook. Originally posted in Counterpunch.org on February 18, 2020, here Soros is of course right. Zuckerberg has said that Facebook will not attempt to verify the accuracy of the political ads that it runs. This is a green light for any sleazebag to push the most outrageous claims that they want in order to further the election of their favoured candidate. This will almost certainly benefit Donald Trump’s re-election since the one area where he...

By Umberto Eco February 24, 2020 One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.) Originally posted on OpenCulture on November 22, 2016, here Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian,...

By Craig Murray January 31, 2020 In one of the series of blatant lies the USA has told to justify the assassination of Soleimani, Mike Pompeo said that Soleimani was killed because he was planning “imminent attacks” on US citizens. It is a careful choice of word. Pompeo is specifically referring to the Bethlehem Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self Defence. Originally posted on Craig Murray’s personal blog on January 4, 2020, here Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack. That is something most people, and most international law experts and judges, would accept. Including me. What very few people, and almost no international lawyers, accept is the key to the Bethlehem Doctrine – that here “Imminent” – the word used so carefully by Pompeo – does not need to have its normal...

By Nicolas J.S. Davies January 27, 2020 The numbers of casualties of U.S. wars since Sept. 11, 2001, have largely gone uncounted, but coming to terms with the true scale of the crimes committed remains an urgent moral, political and legal imperative, argues Nicolas J.S. Davies, in part two of his series. Originally posted on Consortium News April 3, 2018 here Part One here In the first part of this series, I estimated that about 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the illegal invasion of their country by the United States and the United Kingdom in 2003. I turn now to Afghan and Pakistani deaths in the ongoing 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan. In part three, I will examine U.S.-caused war deaths in Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.  According to Ret. U.S. General Tommy Franks, who led the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in reaction to 9/11, the U.S. government...