Media and conflict

Gordon Hahn April 17, 2023 I have written several pieces on the causes of the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War. In them, I focused on the long-term as well as the immediate causes in the run-up to Putin’s decision to invade. However, all this needs to be put together with new revelations in order to understand the mood in the Kremlin in late January-early February (most likely mid-February) when Putin decided to pull the trigger. We have the background causes: • decades of NATO expansion; • NATO’s attack on Serbia, • Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia despite a UN resolution it sponsored stipulating Serbia’s territorial inviolability; • ‘democracy promotion’ colour revolutionism in Ukraine and other states neighbouring Russia; • Western financial and moral support for a colour revolution in Russia; • the Western-backed February 2014 Maidan color revolution; • the cover-up of the Maidan ultranationalist, neofascist wing’s snipers’ flag terrorist...

Or fake à la Falbe: Public service choosing ‘US intelligence’ to protect both the US and Denmark? Jan Oberg April 13, 2023 Ages ago, I was born in Denmark, and I still hold a Danish passport. Quite often, I visit the homepage of the Danish Broadcasting Company – Danmarks Radio (DR). It is public service, regulated by laws passed by the Danish People’s Parliament – “Folketinget.” I sadly admit that there is an element of masochism in my visits to DR. In the particular fields of news reporting on global affairs, security politics and peace/war, this public service’s long-term trend has been down in quality and out of relevance. Sometimes I visit it only to see how biased the coverage of a certain event or decision in the mentioned fields is. I have often written an admittedly wry comment on social media or on my online home and blog, Jan...

Andi Olluri April 12, 2023 A recent Pentagon conference on psychological warfare noted that the forces of indoctrination “cannot wait until a crisis begins”. A high-ranking chief at the Department of Defence suggested a model for propaganda, in no way new: “Look at marketing … What makes people drink Coke, what makes people drink Pepsi?” In short, public “marketing”. “I think”, the chief lauded, that “the private sector has used the information domain through marketing to the Nth degree … And I think we, as a department and in the national security enterprise, need to be able to pull some of those lessons”. (1) In fact, the “lessons” of effective indoctrination and public persuasion have been perfected in the domain of US government propaganda in conjunction with a servile ‘free’ press. A natural prediction of this is that in discussions of war, peace, diplomacy, violence and so on, essentially any...

Toynbee and Ikeda “Another Way of Seeing Things”, is a short film based on an essay by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda – a TFF Associate for more than 20 years – in which, along with a friend and close colleague/collaborator Arnold Toynbee, he challenges media stereotyping and how this can give rise to prejudice and barriers between people of different nationalities and religions. Toynbee – one of the greatest and most respected macro-historians ever – went to a conflict zone and gave an account different from the black-and-white media narrative of the time and was then forced from his academic position. This was more than 100 years ago. That the media convey one-sided, politically correct views or outright lies is nothing new – perhaps what is new today is the uniformity, the intensity and the frequency with which it is done. This is a beautiful and moving rendition of the...

All photos © Jan Oberg Writing this, I must admit that my rage and pain build up inside, still twenty years later. Below, see what TFF and I wrote back then and why we were, simply put, making better predictions on a shoestring budget than the US and other NATO decision-makers on multi-billion-dollar budgets. Like other wars and interventions, this was no “mistake”. It was an unavoidable consequence of Western MIRE – Militarism, Imperialism, Racism and Exceptionalism. The West has learned nothing. Militarism is now its main cohesive force into its manifest destiny: Decline and fall. President George W. Bush announcing that he has just started the war on Iraq. Listen carefully! All the arguments and aims he presents were either false, mistaken or outright lies. And sanctimonious. Jan Oberg March 19, 2023 TFF’s fact-finding missions and scattered memories Permit me start out with a quotation from the British Stop...

Collage © Jan Oberg 2023 A list to be updated if and when Jan Oberg March 16, 2023 The human right to freely seek information is laid down in the American Convention on Human Rights from 1968. Article 13 states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought and expression. This right includes freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 states in Article 19 that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966 states in Article 19 that: “1) Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference. 2) Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression;...

CGTN – China Global Network Television March 8, 2023 It will soon be nearly half a year since German, Danish, and Swedish independent secret investigations on the Russian gas pipelines explosion led to no conclusions. One month ago, American Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh published his report which implicates the U.S. government and answers all the questions in full detail, but western mainstream media has been largely silent in covering this important update. Why? Has there been political pressure from the U.S. government to downplay or ignore the story? This week’s Headline Buster investigates the reasons for the collective silence of the “respected” western media. Join CGTN’s Liu Xin. The participants are Brandon Blackburn-Dwyer, Max Blumenthal and Jan Oberg, TFF. Enjoy! If not starting immediately, scroll to 1:10…

Jan Oberg February 20, 2023 This comment was written and video created for and published by China Daily on February 20, 2023. The daily also used it for a special feature with three experts, which you may read here. It has also been published by The Citizen in India. Whatever other reasons that a war is raging in Ukraine, one major reason is that we live in times characterised by the increasingly dangerous – perhaps fatal – combination of intellectual-moral disarmament and military re-armament. Militarism is now the main factor holding the West NATO/EU world together. It’s a religion and NATO its church. In different ways, militarists argue that their side was historically innocent and are justified to do what they do now; NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg even states that NATO is not a party to the conflict. Secondly, they argue that they must win, meaning others must lose. The latter...

Palki Sharma Firstpost, India February 10, 2023 Isn’t this interesting? It was NATO leaders, not Putin or Zelenski who, very soon after the war had started, were adamantly against negotiations. Listen to this – shocking – report by Palki Sharma of the Indian Firstpost. The mediator was the former Israeli prime minister, Naftali Bennett If true, this is immoral beyond words. Regrettably, it fits the reports that Boris Johnson conveyed the message to Zelenski that he should not negotiate. Jan ObergEditor

Jan Oberg January 26, 2023 Like the Nobel Prizes, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atom Scientists attracts enormous media attention. It simplifies a very complex issue into a time measure: How close is the world to global catastrophe? This year it is at 90 seconds to midnight. Between 2020 and 2022, it was at 100 seconds. 75 years ago, it was ticking at 7 minutes, and in 1991, at the end of the First Cold War, it stood at 17 minutes to midnight. Philosophically, this is highly enigmatic: Out of 24 hours, the world has always been a few minutes or seconds from global catastrophe. Over 75 years! The whole thing is arbitrary or symbolic, if not bizarre. But it does alert the media and does have the positive effect of turning people’s attention at the global rather than regional or local issues. At least for a...

“Ingsoc. The sacred principles of ingsoc. Newspeak, double-speak, the mutability of the past.” – George Orwell, 1984 Edward Curtin January 24, 2023 As today dawned, I was looking out the window into the cold grayness with small patches of snow littering the frozen ground.  As light snow began to fall, I felt a deep mourning in my soul as a memory came to me of another snowy day in 1972 when I awoke to news of Richard Nixon’s savage Christmas bombing of North Vietnam with more than a hundred B-52 bombers, in wave after wave, dropping death and destruction on Hanoi and other parts of North Vietnam.  I thought of the war the United States is now waging against Russia via Ukraine and how, as during the U.S. war against Vietnam, few Americans seem to care until it becomes too late.  It depressed me. Soon after I was greeted by...

In advance of the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, the UK media parroted government lies and fabrications uncritically and became an enthusiastic part of the state’s propaganda machine. An inquiry into British reporting of the Iraq war is well past due. Peter Oborne January 24, 2023 Intro Peter Oborne’s article published by the very interesting online Declassified UK magazine on January 18, 2023, convincingly documents how the mainstream media use fake and omissions to legitimize their country’s war adventures. In this case, the run-up to the US/UK-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. I believe it is important to ask: Could media consumers be the object of the same gross deceit now when it comes to Ukraine? Is there any real reason to believe that that conflict is covered differently – not the least given the suspicious homogenisation across the media spectrum and the cancelling of Russian media? Oborne starts...